


In Your Game For Two

by MaryPSue



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence, Gen, Origins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2016-09-10
Packaged: 2018-03-15 05:44:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3435653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryPSue/pseuds/MaryPSue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world had turned weird - well, okay, weirder than usual. Grunkle Stan had lied to them, all summer, maybe all their lives. The Mystery Shack was crumbling around Mabel's ears, along with everything she'd thought she knew.</p><p>But none of that mattered without her brother.</p><p>...</p><p>(A note: this fic was plotted and begun before s2e11 aired, and a few of its plot points no longer cooperate with canon. As such, please read this fic as diverging from canon after s2e10, Northwest Mansion Mystery!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I Live for You and Me

**Author's Note:**

> Another one for the [Transcendence AU](http://transcendence-au.tumblr.com). And yes, that title is taken from an N*SYNC song.

Dipper was gone.

In the middle of all the confusion and uproar, that was the only thing Mabel could focus on. The portal under the Shack had exploded, the Shack itself had nearly fallen in on itself, along with half the town and a good chunk of the woods (who even knew there was such a huge maze of secret underground labs and bunkers and cult meeting-places and caves under the town, anyway?), there were things running and flying around that Mabel had only ever seen in Dipper’s dumb journal or the kind of old movies that showed late, late at night on Gravity Falls public access television, and some things that she’d never seen before at all, but Mabel couldn’t bring herself to care much about any of it because  _Dipper was gone_.

Wendy and Soos had both volunteered to go look for him, leaving Mabel, despite her protests that sheshould be the one to go looking for him, he was herbrother after all, to bandage Stan up and try not to think too hard about what could have happened to Dipper. She barely heard Stan’s constant complaints through the parade of scenarios, each more awful than the last. And always, somewhere in the back of her mind, the scream that had been the last thing she’d heard before both Dipper and Bill had vanished was stuck repeating constantly like a horrible mockery of a catchy summer song. It had been panicked and painful, a wrenching sound that was barely even  _human_ , and it was  _definitely_ going to show up in her nightmares.

“Kid? You’re being weirdly quiet. Yeah, okay, anyquiet is weird for you, but this is more weird than usual.”

Mabel looked up from the heart-patterned yellow-and-lime-green bandaid she was carefully sticking over the gauze she’d wrapped around one of the burns on her grunkle’s arm. “They’re going to look for a body, aren’t they,” she said, and the words seemed to stick in her throat, coming out dull and soft and defeated. “That’s why you wouldn’t let me go with. You guys all think Dipper’s d- that he’s not coming back.”

“Mabel, sweetie, it was a big explosion -”

“That doesn’t matter!” Mabel jumped to her feet, her eyes stinging, ignoring the way the porch creaked ominously and a few boards wobbled under her feet. “There’s still a chance, right? We can’t just give up! We can’t -”

Whatever else she was about to say stuttered and died in her throat at the look in Stan’s eyes.

“Mabel -”

“No!”

“Mabel, your brother did a very brave thing – stupid, but brave – and -”

“ _No!_  Dipper’s smart, he always has a plan! He would have thought of something, he wouldn’t have just got  _blown up_ , he -” She was starting to stumble over the words, her tongue too heavy and her throat too choked, and Grunkle Stan wouldn’t stop giving her that  _look_. A little bit sad, a little bit exasperated,  _come on, kid, give it up,_ and a lot tired.

Stan winced as he reached over to pat Mabel’s hand weakly. She wasn’t sure what it was, the gesture, the fact that it was coming from Grunkle Stan, of all people, the long, angry burns streaking up his arms from when he’d ripped the computer in the control room apart trying to stop the portal and save the twins from its inevitable explosion and the fact that it had all been for nothing, because now half the trees around the Shack were burning with weird blue flames and there were giant holes in the ground all over and the Shack itself had been shaken nearly to bits and there were _things_ everywhere and Dipper -

“He can’t just be  _gone_ ,” Mabel managed, angrily wiping hot tears off of her cheek with the sleeve of her sweater. Stupid eyes, stupid tears, stupid sweater, stupid,  _stupid_  silly Mabel. Her voice cracked, and her next words came out halfway between a squeak and a sob. “He’s my brother.”

Stan looked almost…surprised, for a moment, before he nodded heavily, turning his face away to look down at the battered boards of the porch by his feet. “I know, kid. I know.”

Mabel’s next words shriveled up and died on her tongue. There was something about the way Stan said those words that made her sure, somehow, that he meant it. He knew exactly what she was feeling, even though for him, it was an old, old hurt.

Stan gave a grunt of surprise when Mabel threw both arms around his neck in a hug that, she decided, they both badly needed. “Ow ow ow, watch the burns!” he protested, but gingerly reached up to wrap his arms around her anyway.

…

By the time Wendy and Soos got back, the sun was starting to dip below the horizon, and the long blue shadows that the trees cast were growing longer and thicker and darker by the second, the last few dwindling blue flames (which, oddly, didn’t seem to have actually burned the trees at all) casting an eerie light over the Shack. Mabel leapt up when she heard the car motor, but sank back down into her seat when the doors opened and only two figures stepped out.

“No luck, huh,” she said, and Wendy ruffled her hair with a sad smile.

“Nah. But hey, I found out that Soos is scared of unicorns.” Wendy managed a weak laugh, nudging Soos with an elbow, but he didn’t so much as crack a smile.

“It’s not fear, dude. It’s respect.”

When Mabel didn’t laugh, Wendy sighed, leaning down to look her in the eye. “Hey, chin up, okay? We’ll go look again tomorrow. I’m sure we’ll find him.”

Mabel didn’t miss the looks she and Soos exchanged with Stan, or the tiny shake of Wendy’s head. So they hadn’t found a body either, then.

That meant there was still hope.

It had to.

…

The attic room felt very large and very empty and, strangely, colder than usual without Dipper sleeping on the other side of the room, although the cold could have been because every single window in the Shack had blown out and there were gaping cracks between the boards of the walls that hadn’t been there yesterday. Mabel hoped the Shack wasn’t going to fall down in the middle of the night.

Waddles snuffled into her ear, and she smiled despite herself, rolling over to give her pig a kiss on the top of his adorable little head. “ _You_  don’t think Dipper’s dead, do you, Waddles?” she whispered, and Waddles gave a grunt that Mabel chose to translate as ‘no, of course not, everyone else just doesn’t have enough faith, you, Mabel, are the wisest of them all, and also incidentally completely adorable’.

“Aww, Waddles, that is so sweet! I knew you’d have my back.” She sat up in bed, and Waddles plopped himself down in her lap, looking up at her with his usual expression of vague interest. “You know what?” Mabel whispered, taking his front hooves in her hands and gently waving them up and down. “We’re going to go find Dipper. You and me. Okay, maybe just me. You should stay here, in case that explosion let out any more of those dinosaurs from that cave. You’re just a delicious pork morsel to them. Besides, somebody has to look after Grunkle Stan.”

She paused, tapping one finger against her chin as she thought. “I wonder what’s up with him. He seemed really upset when I thought Dipper wasn’t coming back, almost like he knew what it was like. And back in the lab, when Bill took over the computer and he went to bust it up, he said something about making the wrong choice thirty years ago but he wouldn’t make it again.” Waddles oinked, and Mabel grinned at him, leaning down to rub her nose against his pink snout. “You’re so smart. We  _will_  have to figure out how to trick him into telling us what happened so the healing can begin!”

She threw back the covers, slipping out of bed on stockinged feet. “But first, we find Dipper,” she said to Waddles, as he curled up in the warm spot she’d left behind, grunting contentedly. “Well, okay,  _I_  find Dipper.  _You_  stay behind and guard the Shack.”

Mabel tiptoed over to the closet, avoiding the floorboards that creaked (which was most of them, meaning that she did a sort of hopscotch trying to cross the room silently). “There’s no way Grunkle Stan’s going to let me go looking with Soos and Wendy tomorrow,” she muttered to herself as she threw open the door and carefully assessed the strategic value of various sweaters. It was going to be hard to decide between the one with the lightbulb that really lit up on the front (which was definitely not a fire hazard, no matter what anybody said), and the one she’d sewn a series of inner pockets into, including one exactly the right size and shape for her grappling hook, and also had a very cute appliqué of a gecko in a top hat and monocle on the front. “And besides. I’m not making Dipper spend a night out there alone, especially with all these weird creatures running around.”

Choosing a sweater was too difficult a decision to make this late at night, after the kind of day she’d had. She’d come back to it, when her brain was feeling its usual speedy self again and her eyelids weren’t quite so droopy. Mabel left her sweaters spread out in a heap on the floor (Dipper wasn’t there to yell at her for making a mess, after all) and moved on to the dresser that served as her bedside table, carefully considering her arsenal. She scooped up her grappling hook first, without thinking, and then looked around the room.

Her eyes fell on the empty bed on the other side of the room, and stuck there for a little too long before she wrenched them away.

“What does Dipper always take when he goes on adventure hunts?” she asked Waddles, who cracked an eye open and perked up one ear in response, but didn’t move.

She ended up grabbing a water bottle, a flashlight, one of her unused scrapbooks and a pen (to make a rough map and mark off where she’d already looked), and considered bringing the video camera but then decided against it. It’d just be heavy and bulky and annoying, and besides, she wasn’t trying to capture evidence of something or other. She was on a mission to save her brother. It was a little different.

She also grabbed a golf club from the bag in the corner, a nine iron, heavy and solid. Just in case.

“Now…sweater,” Mabel yawned, dragging her feet over to the pile of knitwear by the closet. She dropped her armful of supplies and knelt down, rubbing her chin thoughtfully as she looked from the lightbulb sweater to the gecko sweater. “Sorry, faithful lightbulb sweater, but I’m gonna need a lot of carrying room. Or…would it be better to have both hands free and still have a light?”

Over on her bed, Waddles let out a long snore. Mabel tried her hardest not to yawn, but her mouth overruled her brain.

“Maybe…I’ll just…think about it,” she said, muzzily, as the pile of sweaters swam into a blur of bright colours and vague shapes. “Juuuuust for a minute.”

…

The hallway was in the Shack, but it was also in their house back in Piedmont. And it couldn’t be in either of those places because it was long, longer than Mabel could see if she squinted in both directions, going on seemingly forever, and also it kind of glittered? And the walls were all brick, but some of them had weird moss growing down them, and some of the moss had eyes and everything was in black and white and  _oh_ , okay, so maybe this wasn’t a hallway at home or at the Shack at all, but a corridor in a maze. Except it was also at home. And at the Shack. Oooh, now her brain hurt.

Mabel walked along the hallway, listening to the cacophony of voices filling the air, seemingly coming from behind the doors lining the walls on either side. They were all different shapes and sizes, some no higher than her waist, some stretching all the way up to the darkness the ceiling disappeared into, one only big enough for someone Waddles’ size to slip through. Mabel knelt down and swung it open, peering through into a room that she recognized as the hidden room in the Shack, seeing herself, her brother, and her friends running around and zapping each other, swapping bodies with every static shock. She giggled at the sight, remembering what a nightmare it had been trying to get everyone sorted out. It had been fun to find out what it was like being a pig, though.

“Mabel?”

Mabel shot up so fast she banged her head on the door frame, rubbing it and muttering “Ow,” as she scrambled back out of the doorway and shut the door behind her. Echoey as it had been, that had been Dipper’s voice, calling her name, and somehow she knew that it wasn’t another memory.

“Dipper?” she shouted back, holding both hands in front of her mouth as a makeshift megaphone. Her voice echoed along the length of the hall, growing distorted with each echo until it didn’t sound like a word anymore.

She stood up, pausing only to brush off her knees, and broke into a run in the direction she thought she’d heard Dipper’s voice from. As she went, though, the long, perfectly straight hallway seemed to twist, so gently that at first she didn’t even notice it, until she looked back and saw only a wall behind her. Puppet-creatures waved from the walls, but she ignored them. Doors flew open and slammed shut in her face as she ran, some opening onto vividly colourful scenes from her memories, others leading down more twisting and turning hallways. Mabel heard her brother call her name again, and tore down one of the branches without slowing down, skidding around the corner in her sock feet. “Hang on, I’m coming!”

“Mabel!” Dipper’s voice was full of relief, and Mabel knew she’d have to tease him for getting freaked out by this silly labyrinth when she found him. Once they were both home safe. Then she’d tease him. But right now, she just had to open this last door –

…

Mabel sat straight upright, an excited shout dying on her lips as she took in the nest of sweaters and adventuring gear she’d woken up in, brilliant rays of morning sunlight pouring in through the broken attic window and the cracks in the walls and flooding the attic with buttercup light. “A dream?” she said, her spirits falling along with her face. “But -”

She gasped, startling Waddles awake with a squeal. “Dipper!”

Reaching out, Mabel grabbed hold of the first sweater she touched, pulling on clothes and yanking her sweater over her head, hastily stuffing her little collection of adventuring gear into her pockets. “I’m coming!” she shouted, as she barreled out the door and down the stairs.


	2. Just Another Player

Mabel was almost out the door when her grunkle’s voice came from the kitchen.

“Mabel, that you?”

Mabel froze with a hand outstretched for the doorknob. “…No?” she said, in the deepest fake voice she could manage.

“Yeah, right. Get in here, kid, I made breakfast.”

“ _Please_  tell me it’s not Stancakes,” Mabel muttered under her breath, shoulders slumping as she turned away from the door.

It was, in fact, not Stancakes. Almost as soon as Mabel’s butt hit the chair, a heaping plate of bacon and eggs was placed in front of her. (Mabel surreptitiously checked under the table to make sure Waddles was still following her.) Ordinarily, this would have been a treat, but then, ordinarily, Dipper would’ve been sitting beside her, poking at the bacon with that worried look he got when he was overthinking something and asking what, exactly, Grunkle Stan was trying to bribe them for.

“Grunkle Stan, are you trying to bribe me into staying at the Shack and not going looking for Dipper?” Mabel demanded, fixing her great uncle with her best penetrating stare, the one she’d copied off some cop show. Maybe it only worked if you were actually a cop, because Stan just laughed.

“Hah! Good one, kid! Wish I’d thoughta that.” He gave a grunt as he lowered himself into the chair across from Mabel, wincing as he carefully set down his own plate of bacon and eggs, and it struck Mabel suddenly that, while he had to be  _at least_ , like, a hundred billion years old or something, Grunkle Stan never really acted like an old person.

He was acting very old today.

“Hey, take a picture, it lasts longer,” Stan said, with his mouth full of bacon, and Mabel, dutifully, pulled out her trusty camera. “Figure of speech, figure of speech! Just quit starin’ and eat your breakfast already, sheesh.”

Mabel stuffed her camera back in her pocket, and shoveled a forkful of eggs into her mouth. For a few minutes, the kitchen was silent save for the sounds from outside coming through the broken window, the faint whisper of the wind and contented bleating from the goat, with the occasional distant cry that Mabel didn’t recognize and wasn’t sure she wanted to.

“Hey, you fell asleep in a pile of sweaters last night,” Stan said, in between bites. “Woulda put you to bed, but that pig of yours was hogging the whole thing. Hah! Hogging. It’s funny because he’s a pig.”

Mabel managed to take one more bite of her breakfast before pushing the plate away. “Grunkle Stan, I’m not hungry.”

“What? You gotta be kidding me, this is the best breakfast I’ve made for you kids all summer and you don’t wanna eat it?” He stopped, blinked, and then, before Mabel could say anything, slumped back in his seat, looking tired and defeated. “You kids. Yeah.”

“Grunkle Stan -” Mabel started, leaning forward to pat his hand comfortingly, and he yelped.

“Ow! I keep telling you, kid,  _watch the burns_!”

Mabel bit her bottom lip, pulling her hand back. “Sorry!”

The kitchen went quiet again. Mabel looked down at Waddles’ trusting little face and wondered if it would be unethical to feed him her bacon.

Finally, Grunkle Stan heaved a long sigh, pushing himself to his feet. “Whaddaya know, I’m not hungry either,” he grumbled, scooping up both his own plate and Mabel’s. He shuffled over to the counter, scraping the mostly-full plates off into a plastic container and sticking it into the fridge, the lightbulb inside flickering on and off before he slammed the door.

Mabel slipped down off her chair as he turned to put the dishes in the sink, tiptoeing forward with a glance back at Waddles and a finger pressed to her lips signaling for silence. She stopped cold, though, when Stan said, still facing the sink, “I know I can’t make up for this with food. Hell, I can’t make up for this at all. If I’d just told you two everything as soon as your idiot brother started sticking his nose in places where something was bound to bite it off -”

“You were just trying to keep us safe,” Mabel interrupted, trying to tamp down the sick twisting feeling that filled her gut.

“Hah! Yeah, I said that, didn’t I?” Stan turned on the faucet, but nothing came out but a few creaks and thumps from somewhere in the plumbing. “Mabel, sweetie, thought you’d’ve noticed by now that your grunkle’s a liar.”

"What? What are you saying?"

“I’m saying I got your brother killed, what’s it sound like?”

Somewhere outside the window, something screamed, sounding suspiciously human. It took a while for the echoes to fade away.

“I shoulda been telling you both this,” Stan said, to the sink. “Shoulda been both of you here, shoulda said something before it was too late. That thing in the basement, that portal Bill blew up…I let it take my brother away from me. I shouldn’t’a let it take yours, too.”

Of the twins, Mabel was the one who was best with people. She got along with them. She made friends instantly and effortlessly. She always knew the right thing to say, knew how to make someone laugh, knew when to tease someone out of a bad mood and when to just quietly share it with them.

She had no idea what to say to this.

“You didn’t,” she said, at last, putting a hand lightly on Stan’s bandaged arm, careful not to press down too hard or to rub at all. “Bill tricked you, it’s not your fault. You did your best, you…you saved us.”

The only response she got was a harsh laugh. “Saved you? Your brother’s  _gone_ , kid. And take it from me.” Stan looked down at Mabel, and she saw why he’d kept his face turned away through the whole conversation. She’d never seen her grunkle really cry before, and even though those weren’t actual tears in his eyes yet, they seemed dangerously close.

“You don’t wanna be there when they find his body.”

Mabel opened her mouth to say – what? She didn’t know, and neither of them would ever find out, because that was when a shadow flickered across the kitchen window, accompanied by an eardrum-rending screech from overhead and a sound of crashing and tearing wood from the attic.

Mabel darted forward, towards the door, but was brought up short by a hand on her chest.

“You stay here, kid,” Grunkle Stan said, any trace of sadness vanishing from his voice, replaced by grim determination. He pushed by Mabel, grabbing a cleaver from the knife rack as he went, and stalked out of the kitchen, pausing for a moment at the foot of the stairs to glance back over his shoulder. “I mean it. This could get messy.”

Mabel swallowed hard, and nodded, scooping Waddles up in her arms and trying not to think too hard about the crashing that was still going on upstairs.

She watched until Stan’s slippered feet vanished over the top step, and then waited, quietly, listening hard. The crashing and tearing went on for what felt like an agonizingly long time, and then there was a minute or so of breathless silence.

Then whatever had settled in the attic let out another unearthly screech that shook the Mystery Shack on its foundations (not all that hard to do, now), and the crashing and thumping started up again, sounding more frantic and chaotic than before.

Mabel bit her bottom lip, and glanced over at the front door. The way was clear, and if she went now, Stan wouldn’t notice that she was gone until he was done wrestling…whatever it was up in the attic. On the other hand, if he needed her help, she wouldn’t be there. And she still had to sit him down and make him explain just what had happened to the brother he’d said he’d lost and why he thought he’d gotten Dipper killed. Sure, they’d made a good start, but he was really going to have to open up if he wanted to deal with the root of the problem –

There was another screech from the attic, quickly choked off into a squawk, and the crashing and thumping quieted down. Mabel, sensing that her window of opportunity was closing fast, grabbed her golf club and dashed over to the door. “You keep watch here, okay?” she whispered to Waddles, who cocked his head to one side and watched her as she eased the door open, slipping out as quietly as she could. She shut the door, then threw it open again, sticking her head back inside to see Waddles, who hadn’t moved. “Maybe go get Grunkle Stan’s orthopedic back pillow. I have a feeling he’s gonna need it.”

Ducking out of the door again and shutting it carefully behind her, she ran to the golf cart, twisted the key in the ignition, and drove, not looking back until she reached the treeline. Then, she risked a glance behind her, just to make sure that whatever had been in the attic hadn’t followed her.

It hadn’t. Through the massive hole in the roof of the Mystery Shack (which, she noticed, had torn through the part of the sign with the S that they couldn’t seem to get to stay up), Mabel caught a glimpse of an enormous leathery wing, flailing wildly for a second before it shrank back down into the hole. Another screech came from the Shack, sounding almost forlorn as it fell away behind her, and Mabel hoped quietly, but fiercely, that whatever it was that had crashed into the Shack, it didn’t have a taste for pork. Or for people.

…

Mabel had been driving for all of about three minutes before she started to wonder just what she was doing. Well, all right, she’d been wondering that ever since she left the Shack, but that was because she felt guilty for leaving Grunkle Stan alone with a flying monster and Waddles. And…she knew Grunkle Stan could take care of himself. He’d punched a pterodactyl in the  _face_. Right now, her brother needed her more.

Still, the farther she drove into the eerily quiet forest, the more she didn’t exactly doubt her plan, of course it was a good plan, it had been  _her_  who’d come up with it, after all, but started to wonder if, maybe, she hadn’t thought it through as carefully as she maybe could have. Possibly. And wow, it was usually quiet in the forest, but was it always this quiet? All the usual rustling and chirping and woodland animal noises had stopped, and the only familiar animals she saw were tearing past at top speed, like they were scared that something was going to catch up.

There were plenty of unfamiliar animals, though – or maybe ‘creatures’ was a better word – and they were impossible to miss. Something with huge, heavy wings and a roar like a chainsaw crossed with an air horn thundered past overhead, casting a shadow over Mabel and kicking up a bunch of tiny whirlwinds that halfheartedly blew pine needles and dust into her face. Tiny, brightly-coloured things with human-looking faces and too many spindly legs filled the air in a grove she trundled through with the whisper of glittering wings. Once, Mabel had to stamp on the brakes, hard, to avoid hitting something that looked like a massive deer with candles flickering on each prong of its enormous antlers when it stepped out in front of her. She met its liquid, curiously intelligent eyes for a moment before it stepped lightly and soundlessly off the path and vanished into the trees, leaving a trail of glowing purple moss everywhere its hooves had touched.

“Oh man, what is going  _on_  here?” Mabel said softly to herself, watching the spot where the deer-creature had disappeared and wondering how it kept from getting its antlers stuck between the trees. She also wondered whether the moss would be safe to drive over – it was really pretty, but it probably had some kind of weird magical properties, and it would make it kind of hard to keep driving the golf cart if it turned into a pumpkin or something around her.

Dipper probably would’ve figured out what the moss did. He’d find the answer somewhere in that journal, or he’d do some kind of experiment to find out that would dye him purple or blow his eyebrows off or something. At least, he wouldn’t be sitting here without a plan.

Mabel choked back a sniffle, just a little one, and squared her shoulders. The sooner she found her brother, the sooner they could start figuring out what the deal was with all the weirdo wildlife.  _Together_.

Mabel gripped the steering wheel, and stomped on the gas.

The golf cart did not turn into a pumpkin from driving over the glowing purple moss. It did start to levitate a few inches off the ground, but all that did was make the ride a lot smoother for a few minutes before the levitation wore off. Mabel drove through a patch of fog that seemed to reverse the colours of everything it touched, down into a dip that she realized just in time was actually some kind of mouth, nearly blowing out a tire when it snapped closed, and around an upside-down loop that seemed to warp the laws of gravity around itself before realizing that, even though she pretty much knew the forest after running around it after all kinds of crazy stuff all summer, this was not the same forest as it had been two days ago. She hadn’t known it was even possible for Gravity Falls to get weirder, but somehow, it looked like the place had managed it.

“No wonder Dipper hasn’t made it home yet,” Mabel muttered, peering out under the roof of the golf cart as she trundled through a suspiciously quiet and lovely glade. She thought it looked familiar, but she couldn’t be sure. She’d definitely seen some of these trees before, at least. Earlier that morning. In a different part of the forest. Darn it, she _knew_ they’d been picking up their roots and moving around when she wasn’t looking!

Mabel took her foot off the gas and let the golf cart roll to a stop, sighing and slumping forward to rest her forehead against the steering wheel. What was she going to do? She hadn’t even thought about the forest having changed, she hadn’t considered just how big it was, or that she didn’t really even know where to start looking – even if she could find her way, now, with the stupid trees running around behind her back. Of course, she wasn’t going to let a little thing like being completely and hopelessly lost stop her, but it would be nice to have something to go on. Anything at all, really. Some sort of – a sign, or a clue, or –

“Well, well, well. If it isn’t  _Mabel_.”

Mabel spun in her seat, her head snapping up, but there was no one there. She heard someone clear their throat, and stage-whispered, “Are you invisible?” Oh man. What if – “Are you a wizard? Wait. Were you in our closet?”

“What? No, I’m down here.”

Mabel looked down. “Oh, hi, Jeff.”

Jeff the gnome crossed his arms, grinning up at her triumphantly. “So you changed your mind, did you? Now that this isn’t the humans’ world anymore, you decided that being gnome queen wasn’t such a bad idea after all? Well,  _tough luck_ , sister! You had your chance with us, and you blew it!”

“Okay,” Mabel said.

“Oh, you can beg, you can grovel, but we won’t be moved! You – what? ‘Okay’?”

“Yeah. Okay.” Mabel shrugged. “I already told you guys I don’t want to be gnome queen. And I thought you weren’t ever going to speak to us again after the whole…Gideon thing?”

“Uhhhh…” Jeff looked away, awkwardly tapping his two index fingers together. “Yeah. Yeah, that – we all kind of agreed to pretend that never happened.”

Mabel pressed her lips together as tight as possible and puffed out her cheeks, trying not to laugh. Judging by the unimpressed look Jeff was giving her, she wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

“Yeah. Go ahead. Laugh. It’s not like you set us up for that. Or anything.”

“I’m sorry you’re just so cute when you’re mad!” Mabel burst out, before clapping both hands over her mouth. An idea struck her, and she lowered her hands again, putting on her best, most charming smile. “Listen, Jeff, I’m  _really_ sorry about that, but I need your help. You haven’t seen my brother anywhere, have you?”

“What, the sweaty one? Nah, haven’t seen him.” Jeff shrugged, and then seemed to remember that he was supposed to be mad at Mabel. “And even if I had, I wouldn’t tell  _you_!”

“Well, thanks anyway!” Mabel said brightly, sitting up in the driver’s seat and pressing down on the gas. She rolled about a foot before abruptly realizing just what was off about what Jeff had said, and stomped on the brake so hard that the golf cart let out a loud screech as it shuddered to a halt. Mabel grabbed her golf club from the seat beside her and jumped down from the seat, advancing on Jeff in a way that she hoped said that she wasn’t thinking of using the golf club on him  _now_ , but it was definitely an option she was keeping open.

“What was that you said about ‘the humans’ world’ again?”

Jeff glanced right, then left, clearly looking for an escape. “What – did I say that? I don’t remember saying that. Maybe you’re hearing things. Your big human ears -” He stopped, gulping as Mabel wrapped both hands carefully around the handle of her golf club, squinting as she lined up a shot that would send him flying straight over the treeline. “You know I’m not stupid enough to be out here alone, right? And you didn’t bring the leafblower! You hit me, and the boys will take you down in seconds!”

Mabel, ignoring the pointy red hats starting to blossom from the bushes around her, just smiled sweetly and raised her club. “That won’t really matter to you when you’re stuck a mile up in a fir tree.”

“Okay, okay, let’s not be too hasty here -” Jeff stopped in the middle of his sentence, holding up a hand to the other gnomes that had started to swarm out of the undergrowth.

“What?” Mabel asked, but before Jeff had a chance to answer, she felt it, too. A slight tremor under her feet, accompanied by the faintest of low rumbles. “Whoa, what is _that_?”

Around her, the gnomes dropped their toothy grins and menacing postures, looking around with worried faces. Jeff gulped visibly as the rumbling sound grew louder. “You know what, forget I said anything. I just remembered I’ve got an urgent appointment on the other side of the forest.”

“Hey, what about -” Mabel started, but Jeff had already dived into the bushes and vanished. Before she could go after him, or start to think that maybe she should clear out as well, she noticed movement in the trees at the edge of the glade. Something big was thundering towards her, rustling the trees and the undergrowth as it came.

Mabel raised her golf club threateningly, edging towards the golf cart as she stared into the patch of scrubby woodland, the rumble growing louder and louder as it drew closer, sounding oddly like…hoofbeats? “I’m armed and dangerous!” she shouted at the mute ring of trees around her.

Without warning, the rumbling and the rustling stopped. The glade was silent, for a few breaths, save for a light breeze that ruffled Mabel’s hair and carried a faint scent of damp earth mixed with vanilla.

Mabel hefted the golf club and narrowed her eyes at the patch of undergrowth.

Something gleaming white, so bright even in the dim, dappled forest light that it almost hurt her eyes, gently nudged aside the brush, and a long, equine face pushed through, looking at Mabel with sparkling, shimmering rainbow eyes from under an iridescent, pearly horn that spiraled from its forehead.

Mabel nearly dropped the golf club.

“Oh my gosh, a  _unicorn_ ,” she gasped quietly, gazing at the magnificent creature that stepped elegantly and gracefully from the trees, tossing its proud head and giving a faint whinny. It was easily twice as tall as she was, with wispy, willowy limbs and neck and a sleek, pure white coat that Mabel thought she could see all the colours she could name and a few she couldn’t reflecting off of. It was probably the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in her entire  _life_ , and her fingers itched to weave through its long, flowing, pristine white mane and tail and braid them up with some colourful ribbons or something.

The unicorn lowered its head, and Mabel pressed both palms against her cheeks, trying to contain the shrieks of excitement that threatened to spill out of her. She didn’t want to spook it, after all, then it might run away…or…towards her? Why was it running towards her with its head down and its horn pointed at her like –  _oh_. Oh no.

“Look out!”

Mabel barely had time to process the familiar voice before someone slammed into her from the side, knocking her out of the unicorn’s path. The creature barreled onwards, momentum tangling up its four deceptively willowy legs as it tried to stop and turn to charge her again.

Mabel looked up at her rescuer as he grabbed her hand, dragging her to her feet, and had to rub her eyes to make sure they weren’t playing tricks on her. “Dipper?”

Her brother just tugged at her arm. “Come on!”

The unicorn let out a furious snort, turning to face them, and Mabel scrambled up as quickly as she could. “You’re alive!” she gasped, as they ran for the golf cart, the thunder of the unicorn’s hooves nearly drowning her out. She gave her brother a solid sock in the shoulder as they both tumbled into the golf cart, ignoring his hiss of pain as she threw her arms around him. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, everybody thought you were  _dead -_ ”

"What?” A familiar note of worry worked its way into Dipper’s voice, and Mabel squeezed him extra hard. “Should I be?”

“Of course not, doofus!” She let him go, and caught a glimpse of the unicorn behind them, clouds of sparkling mist rising from its flaring nostrils as it bore down on them. “But we’re both gonna be in a second if you don’t  _drive_!”

Dipper stared down at the steering wheel like he’d never seen it before.

“Oh, just move over,” Mabel sighed, pushing him out of the way and jerking the key in the ignition.

The golf cart chugged to life just as the unicorn rammed it from behind. Mabel and Dipper both let out a yell as the cart pitched forward, Mabel yanking frantically at the wheel and Dipper clinging to the seat for dear life. The cart spun up onto its two right wheels, taking a hard right out of the way of the snorting, stamping enraged unicorn. Mabel glanced back over her shoulder at it only once, to make sure it hadn’t picked up enough momentum yet to ram them again, before spinning the wheel all the way to the left and skidding around a boulder with a screech, aiming for the treeline.

“What are you  _doing_?” Dipper yelled, as they bounced between two trees, branches scraping over the roof and hitting the sides of the cart as they hurtled through the maze of trunks. “We can’t manoeuvre in here!”

“Yeah, but neither can it!” Mabel yelled back, throwing another glance over her shoulder. “Watch and see if it follows us, okay?”

Dipper nodded, and spun around to kneel on the seat of the golf cart. After a moment of quiet broken only by the crashing sound of branches and underbrush giving way to the cart, he said, with forced calm, “Uh, remember how you said it wouldn’t be able to manoeuvre in all these trees?”

“Don’t tell me,” Mabel groaned, swerving right to avoid smashing into a tree and nearly tipping the cart over on its side when she had to yank the wheel hard to the left only seconds later to avoid a bubbling pit of she didn’t  _want_  to know what. “It can.”

Dipper shot her an apologetic look. “Better than us. And it’s catching up.”

“Unicorns!” Mabel wailed, managing to pack into three syllables all of her pent-up frustration and terror. “Is there anything in this stupid town that  _isn’t_  going to try and kill us?”

Dipper looked thoughtful. “Well, there are a few species of moss that -”

“ _Not helping!_ ”

“Wait, I have an idea!” Dipper pointed directly ahead of them, at a massive pine tree that was standing directly in their way. “Step off the gas a bit, let the unicorn start to catch up, and keep aiming straight for that tree!”

“What? How is  _that_  going to help us?”

The grin that Dipper gave her was just a little bit nastier than his usual proud smile at having figured out a tricky puzzle. “Remember how much trouble it had stopping and turning around once it got some momentum built up?”

Mabel smiled, and eased her foot off the gas.

She held her breath and her course as the unicorn thundered closer and closer, as the tree grew bigger and bigger in her vision. “Not yet,” Dipper said, as the dull rumble of hoofbeats grew loud enough to nearly drown out the golf cart’s engine. “Not yet…not yet…”

"Dipper?" Mabel asked. That tree was  _really_  close, and the unicorn wasn’t the only one that had a little trouble with corners.

"Just a little longer!"

“ _Dipper_!”

“ _Now_!”

Mabel screamed and shut her eyes as the tree filled her vision, swinging the wheel hard to the left. The golf cart wobbled, veered up on two wheels, and teetered for a moment on the edge of disaster before falling back onto all four wheels and speeding away.

From behind them, Mabel heard a  _thud_ , followed by enraged whinnying. She risked a quick glance over her shoulder, to see the unicorn pawing furiously at the ground, trying with little success to tug its horn free of the tree it had rammed it into.

"Ha  _ha_!” she crowed, cupping one hand around her mouth in a makeshift megaphone and pumping the other in the air. “How’s  _that_  for a manoeuvre?”

“ _Watch where you’re steering this thing!_ ”

…

Once they found the road, it didn’t take long to get back out of the woods. After all the excitement, the road was almost  _too_ quiet, and Mabel caught herself looking over her shoulder more than once, half-convinced that the unicorn had worked its way free and was coming after them again. Dipper was oddly quiet, too, looking everywhere but at Mabel and not even pointing out every weird creature that ran or flew or oozed by them.

“What’s with the long face, broski?” Mabel asked, when the silence finally started to wear on her nerves. Dipper looked over at her with a frown that was one part confusion, one part frustration.

“Why did you think I was dead?”

Mabel’s eyebrows shot up with surprise. “Um,  _doi_ , you were missing for almost two days after that huge explosion! Don’t you remember?”

“I…don’t know.” Dipper turned away again, bringing a hand up to touch the back of his head and wincing. “I think maybe I hit my head after the…explosion?”

“What, and you didn’t wonder why you were wandering around in the woods all alone?” Mabel laughed, but Dipper didn’t, and Mabel sighed, reconsidering her plan of attack. “Hey, what’s the last thing you can remember? Maybe we can figure out what happened.”

“I’m not sure,” Dipper said slowly. “There was…the explosion was underground, right?”

“Yup! In Grunkle Stan’s creepy basement lab…thing.”

Dipper nodded. “Yeah…yeah, and there was that…magical pulse -”

“Yeah! And then Bill grabbed you and then,  _poof_! You both just, like, vanished!” Mabel grinned hopefully at Dipper, but he just shook his head.

“Nope. I’ve got nothing past that part. Whatever happened with Bill, it’s gone.” He hesitated, just slightly, before saying ‘Bill’, and Mabel reached out and wrapped an arm around his shoulders, giving him a squeeze that was just as reassuring for her as she meant it to be for him.

“That doesn’t matter. We can figure it out, okay? I’m just…I’m really glad you’re back, safe and sound.” Her fingers touched something with the same texture as jelly on his shoulder, and she pulled her arm away. “And  _slimy_! Ugh, what even  _is_  this?” she asked, peering at the clear, oozy substance stuck to her fingers.

“Ran into a giant snail-thing,” Dipper said, as Mabel wiped her hand on his t-shirt. “Or maybe I should say it ran into me.”

“You’re all bloody and mucky, too!” Mabel shook her head, wrinkling her nose. “We are hosing you off before you even put a toe in the door of the Mystery Shack, mister!”

“Fine by me,” Dipper said distractedly, turning around to stare as something almost as tall as the tops of the trees skittered across the road behind them on stilt-like legs.

Mabel turned back to watch the road, a small smile stealing across her face as a rush of relief and joy welled up almost painfully in her chest and made a lump in her throat, wrapping around her like the warmest, cuddliest sweater ever knitted. Just having her brother back, after fearing that she’d never see him again, was – it was like a kind of magic. And not the Gravity Falls kind that kept nearly getting them killed.

The kind that made everything turn out all right in the end.


	3. Ain't No Lie

The clearing around the Mystery Shack was quiet when Mabel and Dipper rolled in – almost too quiet. No one was screaming or yelling, nothing more seemed to have exploded, and there was no sign of the thing that had crashed into the roof, except for the giant hole it had left. The Shack itself, once they crossed the porch and opened the door, was just as quiet. Nothing seemed to move, the hush almost oppressively loud. It was the kind of hush that made you almost want to whisper and tiptoe, just so you didn’t break it.

So, naturally, Mabel drew in a deep breath, cupped her hands around her mouth like a megaphone, and yelled “GRUNKLE STAAAAAAAN!” at the top of her lungs.

“Ow!” Dipper clapped both hands over his ears. “Do you haveto yell?”

“Nope!” Mabel answered him with a wide, braces-filled grin, as Dipper took his hands down off of his ears and scowled at her. She didn’t let it bother her for long, though, gasping in delight as Waddles ran into the entryway, snorting excitedly. “Waddles! Were you good for Grunkle Stan? And where is he, anyway? We’ve got a _biiiiiig_ surprise for him!”

She knelt and held her arms out wide, ready to give her pig a huge hug, but Waddles skidded to a halt a few feet away from her. The pig looked over at Dipper, then back to Mabel, and then fixed his little black eyes on Dipper, taking a few shivering steps backwards.

Mabel frowned, raising an eyebrow. “What’s gotten into you?”

“I don’t think he -” Dipper started, taking a step forward, and Waddles let out a scream, a high-pitched squeal of pure porcine terror that Mabel had only heard him make once, when he’d been in the clutches of a pterodactyl. In a flash, Waddles had turned tail and vanished into the living room.

“- likes me much,” Dipper finished.

“Whaaat? That’s ridiculous, Waddles loves you!” Mabel crossed her arms, straightening up. “Maybe it’s the stink from all that muck you’re covered with. Like it or not, you _are_ taking a shower tonight.”

Dipper just shrugged, looking sullenly at his feet. “Okay.”

Mabel felt her jaw drop.

“ ‘Okay’? Just ‘Okay’? No screaming or sobbing or insisting you took one last week? You sure you’re feeling all right there, broaster oven?” Mabel pushed back the sleeve of her sweater and made a show of pressing the inside of her wrist to Dipper’s forehead. “Uh oh! Doctor Mabel’s diagnosis: an incurable case of being a big dork.” Dipper didn’t laugh, didn’t so much as shift his expression from a flat stare, so Mabel had to laugh for both of them. “Come on, you dope, let’s go find Grunkle Stan and tell him the good news!”

“Tell him what good news?”

“Grunkle Stan!” Mabel yelled, running over to the stairs as Stan’s voice floated down from the floor above. Behind her, Dipper sighed something that sounded like ‘again with the yelling’, but Mabel ignored him. He was just being a big grump so he didn’t look like a wimp in front of Grunkle Stan. No big deal. She’d let him get it out of his system and then gladly accept a big ‘missed you Mabel and thanks for finding me and probably saving my life’ hug once he was a little less smelly. “I did exactly what you told me not to do and snuck out while you were fighting the monster but you’re going to forget about that completely in about five seconds because look, I found Dipper!”

“You found what? My hearing aids are going nuts,” Stan grumbled, shuffling down the stairs with one finger stuck in his ear. His gaze landed on Dipper, and he froze in place, arm up and pinkie finger still pressed into his ear, staring.

“Ta-daaaa!” Mabel said, holding out both arms like a game show host, presenting her brother. “Wait, hang on, I might have some glitter in my pockets that I can throw -”

“No glitter!” Dipper and Grunkle Stan said, nearly in unison. 

There was another moment of uncomfortable silence as they stared at each other, before Stan broke it with an exaggerated cough. “So. Good to see ya, kid.” He turned to stare over at the door. “Glad you didn’t get blown up or…eaten by bears or whatever.”

“Grunkle _Stan_!” Mabel scolded, in her best shocked and affronted voice. “Is that any way to greet your miraculously returned grandnephew?” She narrowed her eyes, focusing a glare on her great-uncle.

“Good…to see you too,” Dipper said, his gaze roving around the entranceway with such forced casualness that it was impossible not to tell that he was avoiding meeting Stan’s eyes.

Mabel was in the middle of wailing, “Dipper, that’s even worse!” when Stan surprised her by thumping down the last few stairs and scooping Dipper up in an enormous bear hug.

Dipper didn’t seem to be expecting it either, giving out a startled squawk that made him sound like a goose, and Mabel would have giggled if she hadn’t already been 'awww'ing at the tender moment.

“Don’t give your sister a scare like that again,” Stan said roughly, when he finally let Dipper go, lifting off Dipper’s cap and giving his hair a ruffle. "She's been insufferable without you around to bounce off of. And...I guess I missed you too."

The little smile that Dipper gave him seemed to be too much for Stan to handle, because he turned away. Mabel caught a glimpse of him surreptitiously wiping the back of one hand under his eye as he grouched, “Sheesh, kid, ever heard of a shower? I don’t know how much of that stench is all that crap all over you and how much is just…you."

"Missed you too, Grunkle Stan."

"Yeah, yeah. Now go get cleaned up before I personally chuck you in the lake."

...

Mabel was just tugging Dipper through the door to the second-floor bathroom when Dipper snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Where’s the Journal?”

Mabel raised an eyebrow. “What are you talking about? You had it last.”

“What?”

“When we were looking for that coded counterspell? The one hidden in the binding? Remember?” When Dipper just gave her a blank look, Mabel gave herself a good hard smack in the forehead. “Oh. Right. Guess you don’t.”

She forced a smile, letting go of Dipper’s wrist. “No problemo! You can have a shower, and I’ll go and look around our room – and grab you some clean clothes while I’m at it, those ones really stink!”

Mabel plugged her nose with one hand and waved the other arm through the air in front of her face dramatically, making a disgusted face as she slipped through the door. Dipper looked like he was going to protest, but Mabel slammed the door behind her, leaning heavily against it for a moment. She could already feel a worried frown starting to weigh her down.

Just how much memory had Dipper lost? Back in the golf cart, he’d made it sound like he’d just hit his head in the explosion and lost the hours leading up to it. But they hadn’t even known the portal was going to blow yet when they’d gone looking for the counterspell to stop Bill! That was nearly a whole day before! But he’d remembered the underground lab, and the weirdo magical pulse that had come after the explosion…

Mabel shook her head, and pushed herself up off the bathroom door. She’d ask Dipper about it when he was out of the shower, find out just how much he actually remembered and how much was missing, maybe help him fill in the gaps. Right now, though, the best thing she could do was get him some fresh clothes. After all, he’d just walk around with his towel tied around his waist if she didn’t, and nobody wanted to be blinded by the light reflecting off of Dipper Pines’ bare, hairless pale chest.

...

The attic room should have felt less empty now that Dipper was back. And it did, but not quite in the nice, friendly way that Mabel had expected.

She’d already checked Dipper’s nightstand and under the bed, and was just looking under the mattress (her brother was many things, but trusting wasn’t exactly one of them; if the journal was hidden up here somewhere, it’d be somewhere that nobody – except maybe his very own twin and number one sister – would think to look) when she first noticed the feeling of a familiar presence in the room with her.

Mabel looked up, over her shoulder, still holding the mattress up. “Hey, Dipper, I was just looking to see if I could find the journal before I brought you your…clothes?”

The attic room was empty.

Mabel narrowed her eyes, looking all around, but there was no sign of her brother, or anyone else. Nothing moved, everything sitting innocently where she’d left it before leaving that morning. Still, she couldn’t shake the unmistakable feeling of unseen eyes on her, like there was another person in the room with her, just out of view.

"Is that you, invisible wizard?" Mabel asked, a little uncertainly.

There was no answer, but she thought she saw the sleeve of one of her dropped sweaters flutter slightly.

A shiver ran down her spine, and Mabel dropped the mattress back onto Dipper's bed, ignoring the way the springs creaked in protest. She walked backwards over to the dresser, keeping her eyes fixed on the pile of sweaters by the closet, yanking out a drawer and grabbing handfuls of clothing at random. It wasn't like Dipper cared what he wore, and Mabel suddenly really, really didn't want to be up in the attic alone.

She clutched the clothes to her chest and hurried out the door, shutting it behind her with a little more force than strictly necessary.

...

“Dipper? I brought you – uh, well, it looks like I actually brought you one sock and two t-shirts, and one of them’s the embarrassing one that Aunt Milderprude sent from Cancun but hey, that’s _soooort_ of like a pair of shorts, isn’t it? Also I know your memory’s kind of spotty but, uh, do you happen to remember, just for example, what exactly happened to Bill because I think he might still be watching us.” Mabel paused for breath, sucking in a lungful of steam while she listened to her brother splashing around behind the shower curtain.

“What? I didn't catch that last bit, the water’s too loud.”

Mabel took another deep breath in, preparing to yell her question at a volume Dipper had to hear, but froze when Soos’ voice floated up from downstairs. “Hey, dudes? Anybody home, or did you all get eaten by mutant beavers?”

“Hold that thought,” Mabel said, dropping the t-shirts and sock on the toilet lid before turning and dashing out of the bathroom and down the hall. “Soos! Wendy! You’ll never believe it!”

Both Soos and Wendy looked up when Mabel tore down the stairs, leaping the last three with a huge grin on her face. “Hambone!” Soos exclaimed. “Whew. Thought for a minute there we were gonna have to start building dams for our hyperintelligent mutant beaver overlords.”

“Heya, kiddo,” Wendy said, with a small, sad smile. “Sorry, but…we got nothing.”

“That’s okay!” Mabel said, still grinning. “Dipper’s here!”

Wendy and Soos exchanged a look.

“What, really? Like, here here?” Wendy looked around, and Mabel laughed.

“Well, he’s up in the shower. He was really gross! I guess that happens when you live in the woods for a day and a half and have to fight giant snails. And guess who found him!” She puffed out her chest proudly, pointing both thumbs towards herself. “This girl!”

“All right! Up top!” Soos held out a hand, palm towards Mabel, and she wound up and smacked it with the most enthusiastic high-five she could muster. “Ow. I seem to have lost feeling in my hand.”

“Aw, Soos, you _know_ I high-five hard.”

“Hey, Mabel, that’s really great,” Wendy said, but there was still a worried line between her eyebrows. “Is Stan around?”

Mabel shrugged one shoulder. "Somewhere. Did I tell you he fought some kind of giant…scaly…wingy…monster…thing that crashed into the attic this morning?”

“Really? Huh. So that’s why there’s a giant hole in the roof that wasn’t there yesterday.” Wendy paused, and then shook her head. “Well, it’s awesome you guys found Dipper, and I want to say hi, but if he’s here and safe, I should get back home. We went into town, and…things are really weird. Like, weird-for-Gravity-Falls weird. Everybody’s kind of losing it. And that explosion really shook things up. Dad’s gonna need all the help he can get fixing the house. Again.” She rolled her eyes. “I dunno what he’s so worked up about. Like he doesn’t break the roof every other weekend.”

Soos nodded solemnly in agreement. “Yeah, dude, that explosion really did a number on the town. Abuelita’s house is okay, but a buncha stuff caved in.”

“Whoa, really? Just from the portal blowing up?”

“Yeah, dude! The museum fell into that weird secret temple buried underneath it where the Society of the Blind Eye used to meet before we brainwashed them into forgetting their secret society existed. It’s just a crater now. And half the town must’ve had secret basements or been connected to Mr. Pines’ lab by underground tunnels or something, because the library caved in too, and so did Abuelita’s church...” He counted off buildings on his fingers. 

“Yeah, it looks pretty gnarly,” Wendy said, frowning. “I made Soos drive by everybody’s houses, and Thompson’s is just, like, _gone_. There’s just a hole in the ground. It’s surreal. I hope he’s okay, he hasn’t been answering my texts.”

“...the graveyard, the arcade, that old warehouse on the cliffs...” Soos stopped listing collapsed buildings, looking at his fingers. “Think that’s it, actually. Oh, and all those sinkholes we saw in the woods. Abuelita’s already organizing a bake sale to help rebuild the church, and she promised to make dinosaur cookies if I donate my handyman services.” He rubbed his stomach with a sheepish grin. “Sorry, dude. Can’t miss out on dinosaur cookies.”

“Of _course_  not!” Mabel exclaimed. “Dipper will understand. We’ll come say hi when he’s not all smelly and gross anymore.”

“Cool,” Wendy said, giving Mabel the first genuine smile Mabel had seen her wear since she showed up at the shack. “Oh, hey, and if you run into any of the guys, let them know that you found Dipper, yeah? I asked everybody to keep an eye out, just in case they ran into him.”

“Really?”

“Well, yeah. I wasn’t just going to leave them out of the search, you guys are our friends. Plus, we needed all the help we could get.”

“I thought you thought Dipper was dead,” Mabel admitted, and her voice sounded strangely quiet even to herself.

Wendy shot Soos a look, and Soos shrugged. “Don’t look at me, dude. I was one hundred per cent on board with hambone here.”

“It...didn’t seem like he had much of a chance,” Wendy said, slouching slightly forward as she rubbed one arm. “But that didn’t mean we were just going to give up.”

“Well...thanks,” Mabel said, tugging on the hem of her sweater. “For not giving up.”

That pulled another smile out of Wendy, and she reached over to ruffle Mabel’s hair. “On you two? Never.”

“Yeah, you’re the Mystery Twins!” Soos chimed in. “You dudes saved the world, dude. If anybody could beat the odds, it’s you.”

“Say hi to your brother for us, okay?” Wendy said, as she and Soos both turned to leave. “Just...make sure he knows we didn’t stop looking.”

Mabel smiled. “I will. But I think he already knows.”

...

“Heyo, bro-bro, your shorts are right here in the dresser. Where they always are.”

Dipper looked up from the pile of Mabel’s sweaters that he was fishing through. “What? Oh, thanks.” He sounded distracted, and Mabel’s smile turned upside down as he stuck his head into the closet.

“Earth to Dipdops. What’re you looking for?” She reached into the dresser and, when Dipper turned to look at her, threw a pair of shorts at him. She wasn’t aiming for them to hit him in the face, but she couldn’t say she didn’t feel a bubble of triumph when they did, either. “And put some shorts on, that towel’s starting to slip.”

“Ow! What the...” Dipper pulled the shorts off of his head, scowling at them for a moment before turning the scowl on Mabel. “Forget about the shorts for a minute! Do you remember where I put the Journal?”

“Is that what you’re worrying about?” Mabel rolled over onto her back, letting her head dangle over the edge, her hair brushing the floor. “We _just_ nearly all died because of the stupid ‘mysteries of Gravity Falls’. Don’t you want a break?”

“I can’t take a break!” Dipper threw his arms in the air. “That Journal is our only source of knowledge about any of this weird stuff. Without it -”

“You’re not nothing,” Mabel said, softly, and Dipper seemed to deflate. “And anyway, we can just ask Grunkle Stan about anything we need to know.”

“What, and you think he’ll actually tell us the truth?” Dipper snapped back, his voice bitter, and it was Mabel’s turn to deflate.

“Grunkle Stan loves us. He just wanted to keep us safe -”

“Is that really what you think?” 

“No, you dum-dum!” Mabel rolled over again, so that Dipper was upright in her field of vision as he moved on from the closet to look under the bed. “That’s what I know. He gave up everything he’d worked for for us, Dipper! He nearly got killed trying to save us! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

Dipper heaved a sigh, and looked up at Mabel. “I’m not saying he doesn’t care about you - and me. I’m just saying he’s lied before, and if he thinks it’ll keep his family safe, he’ll probably do it again.” He turned away, sticking his head under the bed, his words coming out slightly muffled as he asked, “Now are you going to help me look for the Journal, or not?”

Mabel threw up both arms and flopped down heavily on the bed. “Maybe you lost it somewhere underground, or when you were lost in the forest.”

“What?” There was a _thump_ as Dipper jerked upright and banged his head on the bottom of the bed. “Ow! Oh no. No, it can’t be out there. Somebody else could find it, it could fall into the wrong hands, it could be lost forever...” Dipper scrambled out from under the bed, hurrying across the room to grab Mabel by the shoulders and stare into her eyes. “You have to help me, we have to find it!”

“Whoa, okay! But not tonight.” Mabel gently pried Dipper’s hands from her shoulders. “Whoa, death grip much, bro-bro? You -” she reached out with one finger and booped Dipper on the nose, and Dipper’s eyes crossed trying to see – “need to get some sleep. You can’t have got much while you were lost, and I _know_ you hardly slept all this week when you were trying to decode that counterspell.”

“But -”

“No buts, mister! Now would you _please_ put on your shorts?”

...

“Grunkle Stan!” Dipper complained, thumping down the stairs and turning the corner into the living room. Mabel followed just in time to nearly be knocked over by Waddles exiting the room at top speed. “Would you please tell my twin sister that finding the Journal is more important than watching the latest episode of Ducktective before bed?”

Stan looked over from his chair with a start. “Finding the what now? You _lost_ Journal Three?”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Dipper said, gesturing furiously at Mabel. “There was that explosion, and I don’t - I can’t remember a lot of what happened after that, and _she_ doesn’t know where I put it -”

“Hey, hey, sheesh, calm down, kid.” Stan held up both hands, palms out. “Don’t give yourself an aneurysm. Where’d you have it last?”

“I - don’t - _know_!” Dipper gripped at his head with both hands. “It might still be out in the woods somewhere! It could be anywhere by now, anybody could’ve got their hands on it - I need to go look for it!”

“Sure,” Grunkle Stan said, shrugging as he turned back to the TV set. “In the morning.”

“ _WHAT?_ No! It’ll be too late by then!”

“Sorry, kid, but we nearly lost you once already this week.” Stan took a drink from the can in his right hand that Mabel was somehow sure wasn’t soda, glancing over at the twins as he said, “Things’ve gotten weirder since the portal blew, and your parents’d have my head if I let you get killed for real. Stay outta those woods after dark.”

“But - but - the Journal!” Dipper whined, shaking off the comforting hand Mabel rested on his arm.

“Kid, your life’s worth a lot more than some crummy journal,” Stan said, staring straight ahead, and Mabel got the feeling that he wasn’t seeing the TV screen. After a moment, he gave himself a little shake, turning in the chair to match the glare Dipper had fixed on him. “I mean it. You two can go journal hunting in the morning. I won’t stop you. Heck, I’ll even go with you. But nobody’s going anywhere tonight.”

Dipper looked like he was going to argue further, but Stan gave him a warning look and he shut his mouth, glowering instead. He turned on his heel, stomping over to the stairs. “I’m gonna go turn the room upside down and make sure it’s not there.”

“Good,” Stan grunted, and then seemed to notice Mabel. “You - you gonna go help your brother, or do you wanna watch the new Ducktective with your grunkle?”

“Grunkle Stan,” Mabel said, walking over to plop herself down on the rug beside his chair, “I thought you’d never ask.”

...

Mabel woke up with a shout dying on her lips, feeling her heart pounding in her chest like she’d just run a mile. She sat up slowly, holding one hand over her chest, as she tried to take deep breaths. She couldn’t quite remember the dream that had woken her, just a faint impression of running, searching for something, something vitally important. She thought maybe she’d found it, or found _something_ , before she’d woken up, but not matter how hard she tried to strain her brain, she couldn’t remember what it was she’d seen that had kicked her back into the waking world.

Her heart rate slowly settled as she looked around the attic, feeling a cool breeze from the broken window waft through her hair and carry in the scents of pines and gathering dew. Moonlight spilled in bright silver patches over the floor and across her bed, illuminating the pile of sweaters by the closet and Waddles where he was curled up snuffling and snoring by her feet. A smile crossed Mabel’s face as she reached down to give her pig a scratch behind the ears, and reflexively, she looked across the room to the other bed, to reassure herself of her twin’s presence.

The other bed was empty.

Mabel’s smile vanished faster than food put in front of Waddles. Of course, Dipper might just have gotten up to go to the washroom or something, but Mabel didn’t think so.

“Ugh, Dipper,” she grumbled under her breath, as she pushed aside the covers. “Why do you have to be so stubborn?”

The floorboards were cold and rough under Mabel’s sock feet, and more than once she nearly stepped on a nail or a splinter thrown up when the basement had blown. She was thankful for the way her socks muffled the sound of her footsteps as she crept down the stairs. An eerie hush had descended on the Shack along with the blue dark, a stillness that made Mabel feel like a criminal as she stole through the patches of moonlight that shone through the windows and the fine cracks in the walls.

She hoped Dipper didn’t have too much of a head start.

Thankfully, she was just sticking her head into the kitchen when, behind her, there was a faint sound. “Dipper?” Mabel whisper-shouted, spinning around to see no one in the hallway.

“Oh my god, I thought it was Stan! What are you doing up?” her brother’s voice hissed, as he stuck his head out around the doorjamb of the living room.

“What are _you_ doing up, huh?” Mabel demanded under her breath. “Wait, I think I _miiiight_ know the answer to that one. Why are you acting so weird about that dumb Journal?  We all thought you were _dead_ , but all you can talk about is finding the Journal, where’s the Journal, where did I leave the Journal, what about the Journal!” She put her hands on her hips, glaring at her brother as he crept out of his hiding place. “Weren’t you scared? Aren’t you even a little glad to be back?”

“Of course I am, that’s not -”

“Really? Then maybe you could start acting like it!”

Dipper didn’t say anything in response, just stood there looking at Mabel like she’d grown an extra head. Mabel glared, crossing her arms. “Nothing to say, huh?”

“I -” Dipper started, but Mabel shook her head.

“Come on. We’re going back to bed, and you are going to stay in bed and get some sleep before you start eating your shirt again, even if I have to duct tape you down.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me.”

...

“Mabel!”

Mabel groaned at the sound of her brother’s voice. “Can’t it wait? I’m going onstage with Sev’ral Timez in three minutes.”

“Mabel, this is serious! I’ve been trying to get your attention for the past two days! I need your help!”

“What? What are you talking about, I found you yesterd-” Mabel cut off her sentence mid-word when she saw her brother, wincing in sympathy. “Wow, bro-bro, you do _not_ look good. And if you came into my dream to ask me to help you find the Journal again -”

“What? I’ve been asking you to help me find the Journal?”

“What?” Mabel echoed. The look of confusion on her brother’s face - which did, in fact, look pretty bad; he was pale, his usual dark circles nearly black, and there was something that looked like dried blood crusted at the edges of his mouth - was probably an exact reflection of her own. “Wait, rewind a minute. You _are_ my brother, right?” she asked, squinting suspiciously.

“Am I - Mabel, it’s me! It’s Dipper! Of course I’m your brother! Ow,” Dipper said, clapping a hand over his mouth and squeezing his eyes shut in a pained grimace. A moment later, he pulled his hand away, revealing a mess of blood and spit and something small and white and -

“Oh, ew! Is that a tooth?” Mabel shouted, backing away. Well, at least that explained the blood on her brother’s mouth, though she wasn’t sure if it was more or less reassuring than not knowing where it had come from.

“What?” Dipper sounded distracted. “Yeah, ever since the explosion they’ve started falling out, but it’s okay, they grow back - at least, something grows back, I mean, they come back a little sharper - Mabel, this is what I’m talking about!”

Mabel flinched away when Dipper reached out for her, and she knew instantly that she’d never be able to forget the look he gave her. It only lasted for an instant, before his eyes went dark and got that closed-off look he sometimes wore when adults tried to talk to him about his ‘problems’ at school, but for that instant, Mabel saw pure, raw horror and stinging betrayal on her brother’s face. 

“ _Please_ ,” Dipper said, and his voice was hoarse, like he’d been screaming until his lungs gave out. “Please, I can’t - nobody else can hear me, nobody else sees me, and I’m - something’s -”

For all that Mabel loved to poke fun at her brother’s eventful trip through puberty, there was nothing funny about the way his voice cracked when he begged, “Mabel, _help me_.”

Mabel bit her lip, and braced herself, before reaching out to put her hand on Dipper’s shoulder. He shivered, and brought a hand up to rub at one eye, refusing to meet Mabel’s gaze. “What do you need me to do, Dippingdots?”

“I -” Dipper shook his head, staring down at his feet - which, Mabel noticed with a twinge of worry, weren’t touching the dream-stage. His voice was barely more than a defeated whisper when he said, “I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Mabel said, softly. A rush of love overtook her worry, and she pulled her brother into a hug, rubbing gentle circles into his back as he buried his face in her sweater. “Okay, we’ll figure something out. I’ll find the Journal, I’ll ask Grunkle Stan, we’ll figure out what’s the matter with you, all right?”

Dipper didn’t say anything, but Mabel felt him nod against her shoulder before he grabbed her around the waist and gave her an enormous squeeze. They stood like that for a moment, both just holding each other tight, before Dipper pulled away. “What was that you said about me asking about the Journal?”

“Yeah, when you’re awake? You’re really hung up on finding it. Like, more than usual.” Mabel clutched thoughtfully at her chin. “Almost suspiciously so.”

“When I’m...Mabel, I haven’t slept since the explosion,” Dipper said, and Mabel laughed.

“Well, that explains why you’re so grumpy!”

“Wait. Grumpy?” Dipper took a step back, his expression shifting into one of worry. “I’ve been stuck floating around in the Mindscape. I haven’t been able to talk to anybody, I’ve been trying to see if I can get into people’s dreams but so far you’re the only one it works on, I guess it’s a twin thing. And even you -” He stopped short, biting off the rest of the sentence. “This is the first time I’ve been able to talk to you for more than a few seconds, before you wake up. How do you know I’m grumpy?”

Mabel blinked. “What are you talking about? I found you in the woods this afternoon! You’ve been hanging around all day! You got a hug from Grunkle Stan!”

Mabel felt the pit of her stomach sinking, weighted down with dread with every word she said. Dipper was slowly shaking his head, and there was something that looked like fear in his heavily shadowed eyes. “Mabel, that wasn’t me.”

Mabel shook her head, taking a step back. “Wait. How do I know that _this_ is you?”

“Wh- you know me! Just a minute ago you were hugging me!”

“Yeah, well, you just turned up in my dream!” Mabel said, grabbing a microphone stand and holding it between her and Dipper, concentrating for a moment to turn it into a giant candy cane with a razor point on one end. “Sure, you look like my brother, but Bill looked like Soos that one time and I didn’t even notice!” She narrowed her eyes at Dipper - not-Dipper? - who stared back with what was, admittedly, a very convincing look of astonishment. “And I know there was somebody I couldn’t see watching me in the attic this afternoon -“

“That was me! I was trying to get your attention!” Dipper took a step forward.

“You’re not helping your case, buster!” Mabel brandished the candy cane, and Dipper stopped in his tracks.

“Mabel...” He took a deep breath, setting his jaw, and opened his mouth. Mabel was expecting him to beg her to trust him again, but she was taken by surprise when, instead, he started to sing. “Well, who wants a lamby, lamby, lamby...”

“Dipper?” Mabel asked, slowly and cautiously lowering the candy cane.

“ _Yes_! If Bill’s still around, then it must have been him you spent today with!” For the first time since he’d shown up in her dream, Dipper broke into a smile. “Mabel! That’s it! I bet he has my body!”

“You _were_ acting really weird about the Journal,” Mabel said thoughtfully.

“It’s got to be him! Nothing else makes sense!” Dipper waved his arms excitedly. “Mabel, you have to help me make him give my body back, and I’ll be able to go back to normal!”

“All right!” Mabel cheered, and then screamed as a light fell from the roof of the stage and landed at her feet. She looked up, to see the sky slowly starting to peel away, revealing grey beyond it. “What’s going on?”

“You’re waking up,” Dipper said, running forward to put his hands over Mabel’s. “Remember, whatever happens, do _not_ let me get my hands on the Journal, okay? I -“ 

Whatever he’d been about to say was drowned out by the thunder of the dream collapsing around them. Mabel tried to hold on, but her brother suddenly seemed strangely thin and two-dimensional, the whole dream turning into a bubble which burst, gently, as she opened her eyes.


	4. Don't Wanna Be A Fool

Mabel woke up the next morning feeling like she hadn't slept at all.

Well, she  _had_  barely slept, what with waking up at odd hours and having to go looking for Dipper all over the place, but she really couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this bone-tired. Maybe it was because of the nightmare she'd had. She couldn't quite remember what it had been about, but it sat at the front of her brain anyway, fuzzy and unfocused but impossible to ignore.

One of her eyes kept drooping, and Mabel tried with little success to stick it up with tape, only for the other eye to start to sink closed. “Now I know how Lazy Susan feels,” she moaned to Waddles, who grunted supportively. 

Dipper, Mabel noticed between pieces of tape and wondering how much it would hurt to jam toothpicks between her eyelids, was already gone, his bed a knot of tangled blankets and pillows and severely-gnawed pens, his hat dangling haphazardly from the bedpost. Mabel paused her experiments in eyelid suspension for long enough to tiptoe over and give the hat a suspicious once-over, in case it was actually some brain-eating beastie just pretending to be Dipper's hat to lull her into a false sense of security. If it was really Dipper's hat, shouldn't it be on Dipper's head?

"Whoa. Mabel to Mabel, come in, Mabel!" she laughed to herself, and it only sounded a little anxious. "You've been spending too much time with your nose in that nerdy book of Dipper's, you're starting to sound like him!"

"Sound like who?" a voice asked by Mabel's shoulder, and she let out a strangled yell, jumping and spinning in midair to land in her best approximation of a judo pose. Dipper raised one eyebrow at the sight, crossing his arms over his chest in a way that was somehow obviously unimpressed. "Wow, you're pretty jumpy for the first thing in the morning."

Mabel straightened up, tucking her hands up under her sweater sleeves. Dipper was still in his pyjamas - well, the t-shirt and shorts he wore as pyjamas - and suddenly Mabel felt very silly for being suspicious of his hat for not being on his head. "Haha, yeah. Well, you could've been...I dunno. Maybe a giant mutant beaver!"

She burst out laughing, and after a moment, Dipper joined in with a small chuckle. "That's...pretty imaginative."

"Um,  _doi_ ," Mabel said, leaning forward to boop Dipper on the nose with one finger. "You're talking to the girl who practically invented imagination. Who created the snadger? The caticature? Fashion that doubles as flower arrangements? Fashion that doubles as  _fruit_  arrangements? Wearable porcupine lures?" She thought about it for a moment, tapping her chin, before she admitted, "Okay, maybe those last two were kind of the same thing."

Dipper shook his head, but he was smiling. "Come on, let's go get some breakfast. We should get out of here as soon as we can, I don't want anybody else getting their hands on that Journal."

Mabel stuck out her tongue as Dipper reached around her to snag his hat from the bedpost. "Boo. What's the big deal, anyway? We already beat -"

"Kids! Get down here and eat these Stancakes before the goat gets them all!" Stan's voice echoed up from downstairs, and Dipper took off out the attic door. 

Mabel rolled her eyes with an exaggerated sigh in Waddles' direction, noticing as she did that her pig had somehow worked his head under the covers on her bed, only his quivering little pink tail sticking out. "Aww, he's just being a big nerd," she said, crossing the room to give Waddles a scratch on his haunches to coax him out from under the covers. "Come on, Waddles! Let's go see how many Stancakes we can stuff in our faces in one bite!"

Gompers was standing in the kitchen when Mabel and Waddles clomped down the stairs, tugging on a frying pan with his teeth while Stan tried to pull it away by the handle. Mabel slipped past the goat’s tail end, cheerfully wishing Stan a good morning as she slid into her chair at the table. She looked around at the sudden lack of little hoofbeats, but Waddles was nowhere to be seen. “Waddles? Where’d he go?” She met Dipper’s eyes across the table, and smiled sheepishly. “He’s probably still traumatized from watching us eating bacon yesterday.”

Dipper’s eyebrows furrowed, but he was still smiling, in a kind of confused way. “I’m...pretty sure pigs don’t know what bacon’s made of.”

“Waddles could be a genius pig,” Mabel said, reaching across the table to stab her fork into the top Stancake on the stack in the middle of the table and slide it onto her plate. “I’ve already taught him to count to five - well, okay, he usually skips four, but it still counts - and we’re just working on perfecting his backflip.”

“Uh-huh. And just - just how close is that to perfect, now?” Dipper asked, spearing his own Stancake and taking a huge bite out of it straight off his fork.

Mabel shrugged. “Well, he can roll over now. You want some syrup on that?”

“And stay out!” Stan yelled, from the hall, followed by the sound of the front door slamming. He shuffled back into the kitchen, raising the frying pan he’d been wrestling Gompers for, and Mabel noticed a bite-shaped hole in the side that she didn’t remember being there yesterday. “Bad news, kids, bacon ain’t happening today. But we got plenty of brown meat.”

“That’s okay, we have to get going anyway,” Dipper said, and Mabel glanced over to see that his Stancake had vanished, along with another two or three from the top of the stack. She leaned over to look under the table, but didn’t see her pig. “Thanks for the pancakes - though, just a suggestion, but hairnets. Definitely something that exist.” He stuck out his tongue, scraping a fine fuzz of white curls off of it with one hand and an affronted expression. “Euch. And shirts. Shirts also exist.”

“ _Dipper!_  The old man body hair is what  _makes_  a Stancake a Stancake!” Mabel gasped.

“Kid, the day I wear a hairnet in my own kitchen’ll be the day that goat stops eating everything in sight,” Stan said shortly. 

“Yeah, okay, but a shirt -”

Stan pointed the frying pan menacingly at Dipper. “Didn’t you say you had somewhere to be?”

...

There was a slight wind ruffling the grass and kicking the treetops into carnival-ride spins. Mabel gave up trying to follow their paths with her eyes when she found herself weaving dizzily, too. She nearly toppled over when she had to take a hasty step back to avoid the golf cart Dipper zipped up in. “Are you coming, or are you just going to stand there all day?”

Mabel caught her balance - or tried to, she was pretty sure the ground wasn’t really bowing under her feet like that, but stranger things had happened even in just the last few days - and clambered into the golf cart beside Dipper. “You remembered how to drive, huh?”

Dipper just rolled his eyes and peeled out of the yard at a speed that had Mabel yelping and gripping the pole holding up the scrap of fabric that passed for a roof.

It took a while, but eventually Mabel pried her fingers from the pole, looking out as the woods sped by and enjoying the way the wind blew her hair back away from her neck. There was a strange smell on the wind, one that for some reason made her think of thunderstorms, and Mabel found herself wondering whether it was coming from the wind or the trees or somehow from the way the woods had changed.

“Where d’you think all these things came from?” she asked, leaning out of the cart to try to catch a glimpse of something that flashed golden in the sunlight as the cart sped past it. “Like, duh _,_  Gravity Falls is weird, but...”

Dipper took a corner on two wheels, staring straight ahead at the road. “I think it’s in the Journal - the author thought there was some kind of dimension that all weird stuff comes from.”

Mabel dropped back into her seat, peering up around the canopy roof as something that looked like an enormous whale swam ponderously by overhead, its belly brushing the tips of the trees and making them shake. “Is  _that_  where that freaky portal thing was supposed to go?"

Dipper shrugged. "Maybe that's what happened to him. What better way to investigate strange phenomena than to go straight to the source?" He looked over at Mabel and grinned, and for some reason, even though the wind wasn't that cold, a chill raced down her spine.

"I'm glad we blew it up," she muttered, turning away from Dipper and resting her chin in one hand.

"Me too," Dipper said, and then, "Do you recognise anything around here?"

Mabel glanced reluctantly back towards her twin. "The trees were moving around when I came to look for you." For some reason, the nightmare she couldn't quite remember was rapping at the inside of her skull again, demanding her attention, and she couldn't shake that eerie, shivery feeling like someone was looking over her shoulder and watching from behind every tree that sped past - "Wait, no! There! Turn there!"

Dipper slammed on the brakes, backing up with a jerk and spinning the wheel hard to the right. They took off again at top speed, weaving and dodging between close-growing trees.

"Whoa, is something chasing us?" Mabel asked, trying to cling to the seat while also turning around to see if anything was coming up through the trees behind them.

In response, Dipper just stepped harder on the gas.

By the time they finally shot out from under the canopy and screeched to a halt in the centre of a ring of trees that Mabel vaguely recognised from the day before, she was ready to fall out of the golf cart and start kissing the ground. She did start to topple sideways, and staggered out instead of falling flat. “Oogh. Somebody stop the world, I wanna get off.”

“This is a good place to start, I guess,” Dipper said, shutting off the golf cart and climbing out, standing with his hands planted on his hips. "D’you wanna split up and start looking? We can cover more ground that way.”

Mabel didn’t. She still remembered the unicorn from yesterday a little too clearly, and what Dipper had said about fighting a giant snail on top of that. And she still had that creepy feeling that someone was looking over her shoulder.

But before she could say anything, Dipper had adjusted his hat and started forwards toward the other side of the clearing. “Great! You start over there, and yell if you find anything.”

“A ha ha...okay,” Mabel said, even though she was pretty sure Dipper wasn’t listening. When he just kept walking, she sighed and started off in the opposite direction, keeping her eyes peeled for any flicker of red or glint of gold amidst the grass. She kept looking back over her shoulder every so often, keeping Dipper in sight.

The farther she walked, the more Mabel realised how quiet it was. Of course, the trees and the grass whispered in the wind - actually whispered, like human voices just on the edge of hearing, although they sounded kind of like they were talking backwards - and she heard the odd howl or roar or trumpet from somewhere farther off in the woods. But around the clearing, there was nothing. No birds singing in the trees, no bugs chirping in the grass, no - wait! Was that a scrap of red hidden under the leaves of the undergrowth just between those two trees?

Mabel shot one more glance behind her, looking for Dipper's back, but he seemed to have vanished. She sighed, took a deep breath, and plunged into the shadow of the trees.

She could swear the temperature dropped ten degrees the moment she stepped out of the sun. Mabel shivered, hugging herself with her hands tucked firmly into the sleeves of her sweater. Suddenly she was glad she'd chosen the lightbulb one - she might not need the light, but the little bulb doubled nicely as a personal heater.

After a few minutes of digging through the underbrush, Mabel finally found the thing she'd spotted from the clearing. She pulled it free with a triumphant shout, only for it to turn almost instantly into a groan when she realised what she'd found. "A gnome hat? Ugh, one of Jeff's guys must've lost it yesterday when they were all running away." She flopped down onto the ground and crossed her legs with a huff, picking absently at the hem around the bottom of the cap. "Stupid journal. I don't get why this is such a big deal anyway."

"Mabel!"

Mabel turned at the sound of her brother’s voice, already feeling less uneasy in the eerily silent woods now that she knew she wasn’t alone. “Dipper! Did you ha _aaaaaah oh_ , what the  _heck_  happened to you?”

Dipper bobbed slightly as he hung in midair, looking around like he was trying to work out who Mabel was talking to. “What?” he asked, finally, holding his arms out. Mabel caught a flash of what looked like very sharp teeth when he opened his mouth. “Is there - something on my face? What?”

Mabel looked pointedly at the feet of empty space between Dipper’s bent knees and the unruffled underbrush. “Did...you...run into some of that purple levi-moss stuff?”

“Wh- oh!” Dipper glanced down at himself, giving himself a little shake. “No, that’s - that’s not new, that’s been going on since the explosion. I tried to tone it down for you last night, I didn’t want you to freak out.” He rubbed his upper arm with one hand, glancing down and to his left.

“Dipper, I have seen you do  _way_  weirder stuff than float around in midair,” Mabel said, dismissively. “But what’re you talking about, since the explosion? And what about last -”

She gasped, clapping both hands to her cheeks as the nightmare that had been knocking on the inside of her skull all day finally broke out the battering ram. “Oh my gosh! Dipper! I’m sorry, I totally forgot, and - the other you is here! Oh no, I helped him find it!” She dragged both hands down her face until her fingers touched the collar of her sweater, which she pulled up over her head.

“Helped him find - Mabel, does Bill have the Journal?”

Mabel shrugged in response. “I brought him out here! I helped him find this clearing! I was gonna give the Journal to him if I found it!” She pulled her knees up under her sweater too, wrapping both arms around them. “Uuuugh, I can’t believe me!”

“Mabel.” Dipper’s voice was steady, reassuring, even if it was kind of edged with anxiety (and muffled through the collar of Mabel’s sweater). “Mabel, it’s okay. If he doesn’t have it yet, then we still have time to stop him. It’s all right.”

“But I - and you -”

“It’s  _okay_ , Mabel. Would you please come out?”

Slowly, Mabel wriggled her head up out of her sweater until she could see Dipper hovering in front of her, his familiar worried look melting into a smile of relief at the sight of her eyes. “There you go. It’s gonna be okay, Shooting Star, we can still -”

He seemed to realise what he’d said at the same time Mabel did.

Mabel scooted backwards as quickly as she could, scrambling out of her sweater and to her feet as she pointed a shaky finger at Dipper - at the  _isosceles monster_  pretending to be Dipper! “You - you - you!”

The look of horror on Dip- on  _Bill’s_  face as he clapped both hands over his mouth was almost enough to make Mabel waver, but she managed to stand strong. “ _This_  is why Dipper’s been so weird about finding the Journal! He knew  _you_  were still around! Well, I’m not falling for your lameo Dipper act, mister!”

“Mabel - no - I didn’t -” There was almost a sob in Di- in  _Bill’s_  voice, and he started forward, only to pull himself up short in midair with a jerk, his legs swinging out in front of him as his top half jerked to a halt. Just like a  _triangle_  who’d never really used his legs for walking, Mabel told herself, as she tried not to meet Dipper’s wild eyes. “Please, you - you have to believe me, I don’t know why I -  _Mabel_  -”

Mabel glanced behind her to make sure she wasn’t about to walk into a tree as she backed away. “Get lost!” she yelled. The longer Bill kept pretending to be Dipper, kept giving her that bedraggled-kitten look Dipper got sometimes when he thought the world was falling down around him or they ran out of cheese-and-cracker snackers, the more the fear that had turned her insides to ice at first boiled away into fuming, furious anger. “We already beat you once, leave us  _alone!”_

She reached down, picking up a rock from the piles of leafmould and moss covering the ground, and flung it. It passed through D- through Bill’s fake chest harmlessly, without any resistance, but he looked like she’d just punched him in the gut anyway.

“Mabel, please,” he said, hanging in space like a sock puppet stuck on a bedpost, with that stupid, sad face on, the one that made him look like a sad crumply pug. Bill had really done a good job with the cracky voice, Mabel had to admit through her rage; a true artist had to appreciate that kind of attention to detail, even if an evil piece of geometry was using it to fool her into thinking it was her brother and help cause the end of the world. “It’s me, it’s - it’s  _really me_ , Mabel, please!”

“No! I don’t believe you!” Mabel yelled, clapping both hands over her ears and squeezing her eyes shut.

The next thing she heard seemed to come up through her feet, instead of in through her ears, making her bones rattle and her teeth jump in her skull. It didn’t sound like either Bill or Dipper, just a weird, distorted, booming kind of thunder that somehow formed itself into words inside her head no matter how hard she ground her teeth together or dug the heels of her palms into her ears.

“ **I CAN _MAKE_  YOU.**”

There was a moment of stillness after the echoes died away, after the ground stopped shaking and the birds had finished flying in huge cawing flocks from the trees all around. Mabel slowly dared to uncurl, peeking one eye open as she started to straighten up - and froze.

Dipper was still hanging in midair, a faint glow picking him out against the forest like the puppets that could take off their heads in that one part of Mabel’s favourite movie, arms outstretched and fingers clawed as they reached for Mabel, face contorted in a snarl that showed off all of his new, sharp teeth. As Mabel unfolded herself, he seemed to crumple in on himself, the snarl fading to be replaced by a wide-eyed sad baby animal face again. Somehow, it didn’t work as well with eyes that glowed a gold that almost hurt to look at overtop of a black so deep that looking at it made Mabel dizzy.

“No,” Bi- Dip-  _whoever_  it was in front of Mabel said, in a voice like a lost kitten, hugging himself with both arms as he pulled back away from Mabel. “No - no -”

“...Dipper?” Mabel said, and Dipper gave her a startled, deer-in-headlights look, before blinking out. It wasn’t like he vanished before her eyes or anything; more like one second he was there, then she blinked, and when she opened her eyes again a split-second later he was gone.

The wind ruffled the treetops. Somewhere deeper in the woods, a very brave bird let out a cautious twitter.

...

The other Dipper met Mabel on the opposite side of the clearing from where they’d left the golf cart. The ground was more shaken up here, and Mabel picked her way carefully over the humps and bumps and big rocks that must have been thrown up from underground. There was something familiar about the clearing from this side, she thought, but she couldn’t quite place it.

“Hey, there you are,” Dipper said, as she rounded the big tree that stood just outside the ring of woods encircling the clearing. “I heard some yelling back there, are you okay?”

“Y-yeah,” Mabel said, looking at the tree instead of her brother. “Just tripped over a gnome, haha. Their hats are, like, the exact same colour as the Journal, did you know that?”

“Huh! No, I didn’t,” Dipper said lightly. “Well, I guess we covered this part of the woods. Do you wanna go back and get some lunch? I’m gonna keep looking around here for a bit.”

“Like, where the giant snail jumped you?” Mabel asked, and Dipper actually looked at her for the first time, cocking an eyebrow in confusion. 

“Giant... Oh yeah! Yeah, good idea!”

“That’s me,” Mabel said, miserably. “Mabel Pines, always full of good ideas.” She wrung her hands in the hem of her sweater for a moment, before she said, “If you show me where the snail -”

“Huh? No, that’s okay, Mabel.” Dipper flashed her a grin, and Mabel tried to grin back. “I think I’ve got an idea now. You can go wait with the golf cart, I’ll just be a couple more minutes.”  

Mabel nodded, and tied the hem of her sweater into a knot.

As she picked her way back over the uneven ground, she found her steps slowing down until she was barely moving, staring down at the dirt. Something was  _wrong_ , she wouldn’t be Mabel if she didn’t know that, but she didn’t know  _what_. And worse, she didn’t know how to fix it. If only Dipper - but  _which_  Dipper? Neither of them really seemed like her brother, and Mabel was starting to think maybe she’d been better off before, when all she’d had to do was find him.

She sighed, and kicked absently at a rock in her path. Mabel had been expecting it to go flying, but instead, it stuck firm, and she stubbed her toe hard. “Ow! Stupid rock! What - hey. You’re not a rock...”

Mabel crouched down, canting her head to one side to get a closer view of the thing that looked like a rock but wasn’t. She carefully brushed some of the dirt away from it, noticing its rough, almost flaky texture and reddish-brown colour as she unearthed more and more of it. “Who the heck buries a rusty old box in the middle of nowhere?” she muttered to herself, and then sat bolt upright as the thought settled all the way to the bottom of her brain.

She only knew of one person who would’ve been burying rusty old boxes in the woods around Gravity Falls. Dipper had found the Journal in one. And if there was one here, then that meant - 

Mabel looked up, with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. 

Now that she knew what she was looking for, it wasn’t hard to spot. The clearing had been shaken up, true, and she had come at it from the wrong angle, but the tree was the same, that branch that Wendy had effortlessly scaled up to still sticking proudly out the side.

But if this was the same clearing where they’d found the Author’s bunker, and this was where she’d found Dipper - and now there were two Dippers running around -

“Only one way to find out,” Mabel said to herself, reaching into her sweater and pulling out her grappling hook.


	5. Hit Me With The Truth

The bunker was somehow both less and more scary the second time around.

Mabel was very glad she'd worn her lightbulb sweater as she crept between the fallen metal shelves of canned food and toilet paper, tumbled around by the explosion like someone had gone bowling in a library. The little circle of light her sweater cast wasn't very big or bright, just a yellow circle in the heavy, whispering dark, but it was warm and cheerful and she only tripped over one or two fallen shelves on her way across the room.

The shrinking room made up of weird moving blocks looked worse than the storage room - one entire wall was shifted onto a diagonal, and the blocks no longer fit neatly together, all twisted onto their edges. A sad, weak beam of sunlight filtered down through the dirt from a hole in the ceiling, a bunch of the blocks dangling by fragile-looking wires. They sparked and zapped as Mabel tiptoed through the room, red lights flickering from some of the blocks and the whole room shaking as the broken mechanism tried to close in on her, but all that happened was some dirt fell in her hair.

Mabel made it across the shrinking room without any problem and without needing the light from her sweater, only having to duck and squeeze her way between a couple of blocks once. They groaned rustily as they tried, in short, sharp jerks that always snapped them right back into place, to slam closed on her. The one thread of sunlight fell away behind her as she came up on the exit, and Mabel felt a little twinge. It hadn't been much, but the watery blue brightness had made the creepy underground ruin feel a little less menacing. Now, there was nothing but the dim, flickering red glow from the symbols etched on the blocks around her, and it did absolutely nothing to make the exit into the next room look any less like a big black mouth waiting to swallow her up. It hadn't seemed so bad when she'd come down here with Soos and Wendy and Dipper - although, Mabel had to admit, they'd also just nearly all been squished by the shrinking room so maybe that wasn't a good comparison. And she'd had caterpillars on her face.

Still, she made a mental note to ask Wendy and Candy and Grenda to come with her next time she had to go adventuring in a creepy Gravity Falls-weird kind of place. Adventures were definitely better with more than one.

Again, she had to squish the tiny, miserable thought that said that this wouldn't be so bad if Dipper were here.

Mabel took a deep breath, standing up as straight as she could and planting both hands on her hips, and then nearly doubled over coughing. "Ugh, dust bunny city," she complained to herself, with a laugh. She looked up at the empty darkness in front of her again, feeling the cold, slightly damp wind that moaned hollowly out of the opening against her face, and smiled.

Mabel punched the lightbulb on her sweater, its buttery glow spreading out to outline the door in front of her, and stomped bravely through it before she could start thinking too hard about it again.

It took some wandering around to find the lightswitch, Mabel's little circle of lightbulb-sweater-glow illuminating a small patch in the chilly, echoing black and casting long, thick, shifting shadows from everything it touched. When Mabel finally got the lights on, the fluorescent bulbs buzzing to watery greenish life, the super-secret underground lab was a total mess. Not only had all the shelves and tables been thrown around by the blast, it looked almost like some of them had been flung against the wall leading out into the shrinking room. There were piles of broken shelving and strange machinery stacked against it, especially around the door, and Mabel had to push one metal box covered in shattered lightbulbs out of her way to get through.

She only got a few seconds to take all of this in, though, because almost as soon as she flicked them on, the lights all turned out again. Mabel bashed the switch a few more times, but the lights only gave one more weak flicker before giving out, leaving her blinking back afterimages that splashed like purple fireworks across the inky dark all around her.

Mabel's mouth felt dry all of a sudden, and she crept over to the giant window into the room with the cryo-whatever tubes slowly. The little light from her sweater didn't pass through the glass, catching in the dirt and slime and - oh man, was that blood? That sure looked like blood - that caked the window. She couldn't see through into the other room.

Mabel leaned forward until her forehead was almost touching the glass, rubbing a circle clean - or, at least, as clean as she could get it, since most of the icky stuff seemed to be on the other side - with the sleeve of her sweater and cupping both hands beside her face to try to see through it.

The lights chose that moment to flicker back on. Just for a second, Mabel caught a glimpse of the containment tubes in the room beyond. Their metal bases still stood in a tidy line. 

But the glass in every single one of them was shattered.

Mabel's heart did a little sinking flop-flip, like a high-diver dropping towards the water, just as the lights died again, leaving her alone in the dark.

From somewhere behind her, she heard a shivery, slithery noise, and Mabel froze in place, barely daring to breathe. Too late, she remembered her sweater was still lit up, making her shine like a giant billboard in the dark.

Well, it was too late to hide, and it probably wouldn't have done her much good anyway. Mabel turned her back to the window, planting both hands on her hips as she stared out into the darkness beyond her little circle of light. "Stay back! I'm Mabel Pines and I'm dangerous!"

"Mabel?" Dipper's voice said, from somewhere near the door. "Wow, guess we both had the same idea. Twin-lepathy, huh?"

"You aren't fooling me, mister!" Mabel yelled, edging away from the voice. "Dipper knows we don't have anything like that! You're not my brother!"

There was a faint, staticky buzz somewhere in the room, Mabel noticed, probably from the busted lights. The cool, damp breeze she'd noticed earlier was back, and stronger now that she was closer to the window, smelling of fresh-turned dirt and just a hint of compost.

The sigh that echoed out of the dark still sounded a bit like Dipper, but the words that followed definitely didn't. "Fine. Then we'll do this the hard way."

There was another slithery noise, and a scuttling sound, and Mabel slammed her fist into her chest, turning off the light on her sweater and plunging the room into total darkness. She ran, away from the slithery scuttling and toward the faint red glow from the door, hoping that she remembered where the holes in the floor and the rubble were, and that the Shapeshifter was as blinded from looking straight at her sweater as she'd been from the afterimages of the overhead lights.

Somewhere behind her, there was a sticky-sounding crunch and an angry hissing, and Mabel crossed her fingers that the Shapeshifter had just slammed into the window. She tried to hold her breath in the sudden quiet, but the slap of her running feet against the concrete floor, pebbles bouncing off her toes and skittering away with every step, just filled up the silence. Mabel slowed to a cautious tip-toe, even though every molecule in her body seemed to be screaming at her to just run already. She couldn't help remembering the time Dipper had beat her at hide-and-seek just because she couldn't resist giggling in the dark basement.

"That was a dirty trick," the Shapeshifter's voice said flatly, from somewhere behind her, and even the memory of that game of hide-and-seek couldn't squash Mabel's urge to respond.

"So was pretending to be my brother, you ugly, overgrown jello!"

"Oh, I  _am_  offended," the voice in the dark said, silkily. Was it closer? It seemed closer. Mabel slowly took a step backwards, freezing in place when a pebble rolled under her heel and went clattering into the dark. "If it's any consolation, I am sorry for practising that deception. It was the worst waste of time I've endured in ages." Was that a shivery swishing sound somewhere near the ceiling? A flap of wings off to the right there? "The worst part was pretending to enjoy your company. I don't understand how anyone manages to put up with you all day, every day." The voice dropped back into an imitation of Dipper's as it said, "Do you even know how annoying you are?"

Mabel ground her teeth. The Shapeshifter was just trying to get to her, make her make a noise so it could tell where she was. She wasn't falling for it again. She  _wasn't_. 

Instead, Mabel crouched down, feeling around on the ground as silently as she could, her heart thumping so loud in her throat that she started to wonder if the Shapeshifter could tell where she was just from its beating. She listened hard as she could, realising the Shapeshifter wasn't the only one who could play this game, but it was harder than Mabel had expected. Was that slithery sound just the breath of air that sucked through the huge underground lab, smelling of dirt and decay? Was that tap-tap-tapping just water dripping from a broken pipe somewhere?

 _No_.

Mabel punched the lightbulb on her sweater back on and, as the Shapeshifter recoiled mid-leap at the sudden brightness, slammed the chunk of concrete she'd grabbed with as much force as she could muster into one of the Shapeshifter's bulbous eyes. There was a noise a little like stepping on a beetle, only much bigger and nastier, and something greenish-blue oozed out over Mabel's fingers, hot and as thick as maple syrup. She dropped the piece of concrete, shaking her hand off as the Shapeshifter stumbled back, three appendages sprouting from the side of its head to press over its ruined eye. "How dare you!"

"That's for my brother!" Mabel shouted, backing away as far as she dared without letting the Shapeshifter slip out of the circle of light from her sweater.

"I didn't kill that sweaty little nerd, you stupid girl," the Shapeshifter snapped, gnashing its mandibles in Mabel's direction. "Though I'm sure the one who did won't mind me taking the opportunity to get rid of  _you_!"

Mabel screamed as the Shapeshifter lunged at her. She spun on her heel and ran, feeling a gust of air brush the back of her neck where her throat would have been only a second ago, barely looking at the ground ahead of her to make sure she wasn't about to trip on a crack in the concrete or a piece of fallen machinery. She dove headfirst through the door out into the shrinking room, and crawled under the blocks that were still jerkily trying to slam together, never quite touching. She didn't stop when she heard a squelching noise and a curse overhead, only scrambled to her feet and started running again.

Mabel slowed down a little as she came up to the staircase leading back up to the surface, glancing back over her shoulder to make sure nothing was coming up behind her. She couldn't hear the Shapeshifter's scuttly feet, but that didn't mean she was safe.

There was no sign of movement, though, and Mabel let out a long, slow breath. She turned back to the stairs - and jumped backwards. "Aaah!"

The Shapeshifter had a face that didn't look like it was designed for grinning evilly, but it had somehow gotten very good at it anyway. It skittered forward, its one good eye staring Mabel down, the other slowly closing over into an unbroken dome again even as Mabel watched. "You know, for things that have survived to become the dominant species on this planet, surprisingly few of you ever look up."

Mabel took a few cautious steps back. She was so close! She was so close, but now she had to find a way past the Shapeshifter again, and the worst possible thing had happened - Mabel Pines was running out of ideas.

For a moment, the weight of everything dropped on Mabel like the Mystery Shack when the gravity came back. She hadn't really found Dipper, just an imposter. She hadn't found the stupid Journal. And, if what the Shapeshifter had said was true, then the other 'Dipper' she'd seen was really just Bill, who had really, secretly won, and just like everyone said, she was just being stupid and naive, because her brother really was -

Wait.

"You can't kill me yet," Mabel said, new confidence flooding through her. "You still don't have the Journal! For...whatever weird reason you want it."

The Shapeshifter's chuckle was something Mabel was pretty sure she'd heard before in her nightmares. "Do you really think I need  _you_  to find it? You don't know anything about where it's hidden or how to get at it. And your whole family seemed remarkably willing to help your brother search."

Mabel's heart bounced up into her throat and lodged there, knocking all her thoughts and plans about how to get out of here to a standstill. She marched up to the Shapeshifter, her shaking hands balled into fists. "Don't even think about it! If I don't come home, Grunkle Stan and Wendy and Soos -"

"Won't notice Dipper acting a little strangely when he's traumatised from watching his dear twin sister's horrific death at the claws of some creature." The Shapeshifter leaned in close, until Mabel could smell its stinking breath, could see her own pale face reflected in the dome of its good eye. "So, Mabel Pines. Any last words?"

"Just two," Mabel said, grimly, watching her reflection reach up into her sweater. "Grappling hook!"

She slammed her head up and into the Shapeshifter's mandibles as hard as she possibly could. The Shapeshifter staggered back, and Mabel took aim at the outer edge of the staircase spiraling overhead and fired.

The hook clattered against the metal, and Mabel rode the retracting line all the way up to the spiral above. She grabbed onto the edge of the staircase as soon as it was within reach and hauled herself up onto the stairs, gathering up her grappling hook and breaking into a run. Below her, she heard a horrible squelch that had to be the Shapeshifter transforming, but she just kept running until she broke out into the sunlight.

Mabel paused for just a moment, breathing hard. The golf cart was all the way on the other side of the clearing, too far for her to outrun pretty much any of the Shapeshifter’s forms on foot. Mabel thought for a second, and then aimed her grappling hook up into the nearest, tallest tree she could find. If Spider-Pig could do it, then so could Mabel.

A few wild swings (and only one actual collision with a tree) later, Mabel stumbled to the ground beside the golf cart and dragged herself up into the driver’s seat. “Whoogh, I think I left my brain in one of those trees,” she muttered, wrenching the key in the ignition and stomping the gas pedal to the floor. The golf cart roared to life - well, as much as a golf cart could roar - and sprang forward with a lurch. Mabel pointed it at the gap in the trees she thought she remembered coming in through, and hung on as tight as she could as the cart picked up speed.

She didn’t start to relax until she passed under the shade of the trees, the air turning cooler around her and filling with the sounds of birdsong and squirrel chatter. Honestly, Mabel was a little surprised she hadn’t seen the Shapeshifter - or anything that could have been the Shapeshifter - following her at all. Sure, she’d been a little distracted with the trees and everything, but it still gave her an uneasy feeling, like she was just waiting for something to go wrong.

Mabel shook her head, taking a hard right around a tree. With Dipper gone, she was just having to be the anxious twin as well as the fun and delightful one. She’d gotten out of the bunker safe, the path was just up ahead, and everything was going to be fine - 

No sooner had the thought crossed Mabel’s mind than the ground suddenly collapsed under her.

Mabel shrieked as the golf cart dropped, along with a shower of rock and dirt and tree roots, into a hole that hadn’t been there a second before. She landed with a thump that rattled her brain in her skull and slammed all her insides against each other, turning everything to black and purple fireworks for a moment. Her vision cleared just in time to see something that looked like a giant mole falling in on itself into a tangle of buggy legs and all different kinds of eyes, looking for another form. Probably a good one for ripping her into pieces with.

Mabel didn’t wait for the living nightmare in front of her to settle on a shape. She slammed the gas pedal down, silently thanking Soos that the engine still growled after the fall, and drove straight forwards, right at the Shapeshifter. 

At the very last second, Mabel cranked the wheel hard to the left. The golf cart shot up along the rounded wall of the - hole? Tunnel? Weird waterless sewer? Secret dinosaur excavation? She ducked and wove between limbs and pincers, keeping the gas pedal to the floor no matter how the golf cart threatened to tip over and tumble her out, and finally steered it back onto the flat part of the tunnel as soon as she ducked under the last flailing, grasping tentacle.

The hole she’d found herself in, just like she’d thought, wasn’t really just a hole. It was a tunnel, like the other ones the Shapeshifter had chased them all through the first time they’d visited the bunker, though not exactly. This one was a little bigger, and looked more like it’d been built by people than by a really big mole. Actually, Mabel thought, trying to ignore the sound of something rolling along the tunnel behind her and picking up speed, it kind of reminded her of the bunker. And the secret basement under the Shack. Mabel saw, flashing past as she sped down the tunnel, rows of flickering lights and odd symbols, half of which looked like they were burnt out or broken. They were set into the metal panels that lined the walls, where those panels weren’t scorched or peeleed back. 

And she was pretty sure that the marking over one of the two smaller tunnels that branched off from the one she was driving down, the smaller tunnel with the worst black charred streaks coming out of it, was supposed to be the portal.

Well, that explained a lot.

Mabel leaned forward and to her left, gripping the steering wheel with both hands as she pointed the golf cart at the left-hand fork. The canopy fluttered as the ceiling of the new, smaller tunnel scraped by, but the golf cart shot into its mouth with ease. 

Mabel couldn’t say the same for the pillbug-y form the Shapeshifter had finally settled on. There was a noise behind her like a cork popping out of a bottle, and she glanced back over her shoulder to see it stuck, wriggling centipeedy legs through the opening as she sped away.

Mabel flew down the rest of the tunnel like a rocket - or, okay, like a rocket would if it was powered by an aging golf-cart engine - and shot out into the secret basement, beside where the failsafe switches had been - before Bill had blown them to smithereens to keep anyone from shutting the portal down, of course. Too late, she remembered the pieces of ex-portal that still lay scattered all over the basement floor.

She slammed on the brakes, and the golf cart skidded sideways, sliding into a chunk of scorched metal as long as Mabel was tall and throwing her out of the cart. Mabel was airborne for just long enough to realise how much it was going to hurt when she landed, before she crashed into a patch of thankfully mostly-clear floor. Mabel’s left shoulder exploded as she landed, the smaller rocks and bits of metal that ripped at her back as she slid to a stop vanishing in the roar of pain from her shoulder. She lay as still as she could, staring up at the pipes and wires that criss-crossed the ceiling and just trying to breathe deeply and evenly, and felt something hot stinging at the corners of her eyes. But she’d made it back to the Shack, to Grunkle Stan and - Grunkle Stan! She had to warn him about ‘Dipper’, before the Shapeshifter - 

Mabel scrambled to her feet, letting out an involuntary scream as icy pain stabbed through her shoulder at the movement. She cradled her left arm with her right as she started to pick her way through the rubble towards the elevator. 

She’d made it about halfway to the observation room - or what was left of it, anyway - when she heard the skittering. It was coming down the tunnel behind her, Mabel could tell from the echoes, it was big, and it was moving fast.

Mabel braced her bad arm as best she could and ran, dodging around the bigger chunks of rubble and jumping over the smaller ones. Every jump felt like it was ripping her arm off at the shoulder, and Mabel could barely tell she was digging the fingers of her right hand into her left elbow. 

The echoes vanished as the skittering thing burst out of the tunnel. Mabel glanced back over her shoulder at the change in the sound just in time to see a giant silvery... _thing_  that looked like a cross between a spider and a scorpion swarm out of the tunnel and up the wall, moving way faster than anything that big should be able to. Mabel threw herself back into running, despite the way it felt like giant icicles were being stabbed through the left side of her collarbone with every step. She could feel a scream bubbling up her throat, and this time she let it go, as loud as she possibly could, pouring every drop of air in her lungs and agony in her shoulder into her voice. “Grunkle Stan! Grunkle  _Staaaan!_  Aaaaaaugh!”

Mabel's yells were quickly cut off when the creature dropped from the ceiling and landed on top of her, caging her in with its spindly limbs and waving stinger. Mabel skidded to a halt, trying to reverse fast to get out of the way of the stinger's strike, but she wasn't paying quite enough attention to what else was going on. She got about two steps before the sticky webbing tangled around her feet tripped her up. Mabel screamed, high and agonized, when her impact with the floor jarred her injured shoulder, but the Shapeshifter only shot more webbing at her, gluing her firmly to the floor.

"Do you ever stop making noise?" the Shapeshifter asked, its many legs delicately picking their way through the mess on the floor as it stepped away from Mabel. She saw a giant eye crack open on its front, rolling madly for a moment before it unfolded on a long stalk to weave and bob like a nightmare swan's neck, taking in the room. "Well, would you look at that. He actually did build that portal after all."

"Is that why you want the Journal?" Mabel asked, a horrible thought striking her. "So you can open a portal to this...dimension of weirdness, thingy?"

The Shapeshifter's eye swiveled on its stalk to face Mabel. She couldn't see a mouth anywhere on the creature whose form the Shapeshifter had borrowed - or maybe invented - but she could hear its voice just fine anyway. "Look around you. Does this look like a great idea I'd want to repeat?"

"What do you even want it for, then?"

The Shapeshifter's eye, which had turned back to roving over the rubble, snapped back in Mabel's direction. It didn't have a real lid, but Mabel was still somehow sure it was glaring. "Tell me where it is, and you'll find out." It collapsed down into its usual slimey-wormy-spider shape, and scurried off towards the observation room. “I haven’t been down here in decades, that old man always had it locked down like a trap.”

“You mean the Author?” Mabel asked. The webbing pinning her down was slightly looser under the fingers of her right hand, and she tried to wiggle them through the strands.

“Of course not,” the Shapeshifter said, with a dismissive snort. “ _He’s_  long gone. But with any luck - ahh.” It vanished around the remains of the wall closing off the observation room, and reappeared with a red-bound book in each hand. Mabel recognised the ‘1′ and ‘2′ written in the golden hands that decorated their covers - the other two Journals that Grunkle Stan had been hiding. “With any luck, all his  _hard work_  isn’t.” 

There was a sneer in the Shapeshifter’s smug voice as it said the words ‘hard work’, dripping with sarcasm. Mabel wasn’t sure why, but she wasn’t sure she cared all that much, either. She’d managed to work a hole in the webbing sticking her down that was big enough to get two fingers through now, and the more she worked at it, the wider it got.

“I wonder,” the Shapeshifter said, its voice treacly as it advanced on Mabel again, “whether your brother ever found out - before his hideous and untimely demise, of course - that his hero was a sham?”

“What?” Mabel had to bite her tongue, hard, to keep from screaming when a too-ambitious wiggle against the webbing jostled her hurt shoulder and sent a searing flash of pain through her arm.

“Oh yes. His precious Author used to brag about it to me, back before he decided I was no longer cute and harmless enough to leave free.” Mabel was pretty sure the face the Shapeshifter was making would’ve been an upper lip curled in contempt on a human. “Everything contained in these little books - all this fascinating knowledge and incredible discoveries? All  _lies_.” The Shapeshifter darted suddenly forward, slamming the Journal marked ‘1′ to the floor beside Mabel’s head. Mabel yelped and tried to jump backwards, only to let out another yelp when the sudden movement drove splinters of pain through her shoulder. “Everything the Author learned was given to him by someone infinitely wiser, more powerful... _better_. A muse, he called it. And then a monster, when he found out what it really wanted. Freedom from the dimension imprisoning it. Total destruction of human civilisation. The end of the world.” 

The Shapeshifter’s face split into a toothy, human grin, looking out of place and gross on its pale, grublike face. “I’ll never know why that naive idiot thought I’d see this thing as my  _enemy_.”

Mabel realised her jaw was hanging open, and forced it closed.

“You’re - you’re talking about Bill Cipher!” she managed, after a few false starts. “He nearly blew up all of reality!” She glowered at the Shapeshifter as best she could, but it didn’t seem to care. “You should be thanking Dipper, you big jerk! If he hadn’t stopped Bill then you would’ve been just as dead as all of us!”

“You really think that?” One of the Shapeshifter’s arms darted out and yanked Mabel’s hair hard, pulling her head up to meet its bulbous eyes. Mabel couldn’t bite down the scream this time as the webbing tugged against her hurt shoulder. “Have you been paying any attention to what goes on around you, or are you really just as totally self-absorbed as you act? This isn’t your world anymore. That destruction you were so afraid of only affected you. It was making this world  _ours._ ” It let go of Mabel’s hair, and she cracked her chin on the floor when her head dropped back down. “And then your idiot brother had to step in and ruin everything.”

The Shapeshifter settled down beside Mabel’s spiderweb prison and cracked open the journal marked ‘2′, flipping through its pages. “Somewhere in this nerd’s notes, there are instructions for contacting this Bill Cipher,” it said, half to itself, and then, to Mabel, “And then, he can finish what he started.”

“ _No!_  Grunkle Stan, anybody,  _help!”_  Mabel shrieked, with all of her considerable lung capacity. The Shapeshifter let the Journal fall open and shot her a venomous glare. 

“Well, would you look at that. Nothing here at all about Bill Cipher needing or liking human sacrifices. There’s no reason to keep you around, then, is there?”

Mabel snapped her mouth closed. If she’d had a free hand, she would’ve mimed zipping her lips shut. She almost did have a hand free, after all. It’d only take a little more working at the webbing - 

The Shapeshifter gave a pleased little hum. “Well,  _that’s_  not hard. All you really need is this incantation.” It didn’t even glance in Mabel’s direction gloatingly before it started to read aloud.

Mabel took a deep breath and threw herself at the weakened side of her cocoon of spider silk. Her left shoulder screamed in agony, but she bit down on her tongue until she tasted copper and did it again. The cocoon stretched, but not eough to let Mabel slip out, and she nearly sobbed in frustration as a howling wind swept over the basement and seemed to scrub away what little colour had been there.

An eye blinked open in the air in front of the Shapeshifter’s head and about a foot above it, a golden tracework of a hideously familiar shape in the clear air. Mabel wanted to beat her fists against the hard floor and scream. It wasn’t  _fair!_  It wasn’t fair, after everything they’d been through, everything everybody’d had to give up - 

Two more eyes blinked open in the air, side by side, just below the shimmering golden one. Mabel blinked too, her train of thought halted mid-misery. She had to be imagining things, but she could swear that those plain, incredibly ordinary-looking brown eyes, somehow, were also familiar.

The air around the eyes warped, like it was forming around some invisible shape, extending down towards the ground. The shape didn’t stay invisible for long, though, blackness bleeding in to fill it out.

It was shaped like a person about Mabel’s height.

Mabel held her breath as the inky figure hanging in midair looked around the room, the brown eyes darting like they were alive under the static pupil of the gold eye. All three eyes landed on Mabel at once, though, and all three widened in identical expressions of shock.

Mabel’s heart thudded in her chest, the breath she was holding making her head start to swim as more shining gold lines like the ones making up the third eye raced across the black figure, tracing the outlines of brickwork. The figure spun in midair to face the Shapeshifter, who was staring at it hungrily, and its inky face split nearly in two to reveal a golden maw.

Mabel nearly sobbed at the sound of the voice that came out of it.

“ _You?”_

The Shapeshifter took a moment longer than Mabel to put two and two together. It still looked confused up until the black bricks started to peel away from the figure, forming a series of spinning rings around the small, dark-haired boy who hovered in midair, an unearthly wind whipping at his hair and his puffy vest and shorts, an adorable kitten glare on his face.

There was fire in Dipper’s voice and blackness bleeding into the veins in his eyes ( _his_ eyes, not the golden tracework of one still hovering in front of his forehead), but it was definitely, absolutely, 100% without a doubt Dipper Pines.

Sharp teeth flashed as he said, “You made a big mistake messing with my sister.”

The Shapeshifter’s mandibles flared, and it crouched, ready to spring as its form started to melt, started to change. Dipper pointed, a flurry of black bricks broke away from the ring whirling past his shoulder to wrap around his hand and stain it black again, and there was a shower of gold sparks from the darkness that had now completely overtaken his eyes.

When Mabel dared to look again, the Shapeshifter was frozen in place, grey and hard as stone, moss crawling over its open eyes and its reaching claws.

The spinning bricks whirled off into nothingness and Dipper gently drifted down towards the ground, not quite touching it but settling only an inch or so above it. “Mabel, Mabel, are you okay? Here -”

He snapped his fingers, and the webbing holding Mabel down burst into blue flames around her. Mabel gave a startled shout before she realised the fire hadn’t burned her at all, the spiderweb falling into ash and releasing her to shakily get to her feet. The fire lingered a little longer on her left shoulder, and when it finally died down Mabel found she could move it without any pain. She gave her arm a few cautious swings, testing the limits of its range, and then darted forward and flung both arms around Dipper’s neck before he could react. “It really is you! I’m so sorry, I’m so so so sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you, I was so scared, it was silly and dumb and -”

“Mabel, you’re not dumb,” Dipper’s voice said, gently, into her ear, as his arms came up around her. He held her gently at first, like he wasn’t sure if she was real, or maybe if he was real, and thought one of them might disappear if he held too tightly. Mabel gave him an extra-hard squeeze, and he coughed into her shoulder, making exaggerated gagging sounds. “Mabel - gack - you’re - you’re kind of choking me here.”

Mabel buried her face in the puff of Dipper’s vest. "I nearly ruined everything."

"Hey, hey, no, you didn't." There was a note of regret in Dipper's voice as he said, "Bill wouldn't've been able to trick you like he tricked me."

"What? I thought the  _Shapeshifter_  was you for, like, two days!" Mabel brought up a hand to brush a tear away from her eye. "It didn't even know my name! It only started calling me 'Mabel' when I said it!"

Dipper's little chuckle was like music to Mabel's ears. "Haha, yeah, okay, that is pretty bad." He gave her a tight squeeze around her middle, and Mabel felt something hot and damp seeping through her sweater on her shoulder. "I missed you so much. I - I was really scared you were never gonna believe it was me."

Mabel just pressed her face harder into the collar of Dipper's vest and did her best to squeeze the breath out of him.

She almost didn't hear the elevator ding, and the first warning Mabel got that someone else was in the room was Stan's gruff voice cracking with fear as he yelled, "Mabel? You okay, sweetie? I heard screaming -"

"Grunkle Stan!" Mabel waved without pulling away from Dipper. "It's okay, the scary part's over. Check it out! I found the real Dipper! The other one was an evil Shapeshifter clone-Dipper. The real Dipper got, like, sucked into Bill's dreamscape-dimension or something when the portal blew up but it's okay, the Shapeshifter summoned him out by accident and now he's back! See?"

"I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, but good for you," Stan said, clearly relaxing at the sight of Mabel safe and unhurt. Dipper pulled away from her, turning to face Stan as well, and Mabel noticed for the first time that his eyes hadn't gone back to normal after whatever he'd done to the Shapeshifter - they still shone gold on a black background. It was kind of creepy, but then, so was his tendency to not shower so Mabel guessed she couldn't really complain.

"Wait, can you see me now?" Dipper asked, waving a hand in Stan's direction. Stan grunted and cleaned out his ear with his pinky.

"Where, uh, where is your brother, sweetie?"

"He's right here!" Mabel cried, gesturing with both arms towards Dipper like he was a glitter-glue abstract sculpture she'd just completed. "You really can't see him?"

Stan narrowed his eyes and peered at the place Mabel was gesturing to, shuffling a few steps forward in his slippers. Finally, he shook his head.

"But you've  _got_  to see him!" Mabel wailed, waving more frantically towards Dipper, who only gripped the forearm of his left arm with his right hand and hunched his shoulders. "He's right there! Why can't you see him? I'm not making it up!"

"I don't think you're making it up, kiddo," Stan said, just as Dipper said, "Mabel, I don't think that summons lasted very long. Maybe only you can see me because we're twins?"

"He's there!" Mabel insisted, as Stan turned his gaze from the spot of empty air back to her face. "Please, Grunkle Stan, you've got to believe me... he's there."

The basement was eerily quiet without the background hum of the portal.

Finally, Stan let out a breath, shaking his head. "One thing I never could stand about Gravity Falls, all the damn weirdness." He shuffled forward, wrapping an arm around Mabel in what was clearly supposed to be a casual gesture, but he squeezed a little too hard for that, and Mabel flung both arms around his waist. "I've seen enough not to be surprised by an invisible kid. Ow, sweetie, remember your grunkle's got a bad back."

"Grunkle Stan, I love you," Mabel said, honestly, and then, with another squeeze around Stan's middle, "Dipper loves you too."

"What? Mabel, I didn't say that, just because you're the only one who can see or hear me doesn't mean you can just tell people I said things I didn't say -"

"It's true though," Mabel continued, and Dipper sighed behind her.

"Yeah. But that doesn't mean you can just tell people -"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever, love you too," Stan said gruffly, tightening his arm around Mabel's shoulders and looking at a point in space a little to the left of Dipper's left ear. "I'm - I'm a little worried about this whole 'dreamscape'-summoning business, but - we can talk about that later. Who wants ice cream?"

"Me! Me me me!" Mabel shouted, bouncing up and down, and Stan winced. 

"Ah, sweetie, watch the hearing aids."

"What? No fair, Mabel's the only one who's corporeal -"

Mabel stuck out her tongue in Dipper's direction as Stan steered her towards the elevator, with a grunted, "You coming?" in Dipper's direction. Dipper trailed after them, still complaining, like a disappointed balloon.

Stan flicked out the lights before they stepped into the elevator. The last thing Mabel saw in the dark was the statue that had been the Shapeshifter, reaching out for empty air, before the doors slid closed.

She reached out, and felt Dipper's hand slide into hers, gripping it tightly. Mabel looked up, and saw her brother's eyes glint like gold coins in the dim elevator.

She let go of his hand to sling an arm around his shoulders instead. 


	6. One Good Reason

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finished the five chapters I had planned for this fic, but it still needed something. So here is an epilogue of sorts!

Dipper was back.

Even with everything in an uproar around them, this was one sure thing Mabel could focus on. The news was full of wild speculation about the 'monster sightings' that seemed to be sweeping the world, the phone kept ringing off the hook with frantic calls from Dipper and Mabel's parents that even Stan, the famous liar, was starting to have trouble fielding, and her brother might actually not be entirely human anymore, but Mabel couldn't bring herself to care much about any of it because  _Dipper was back_.

Sure, she was still a little uneasy every time she had that thought, remembering how she'd felt when she'd first stumbled across the Shapeshifter impersonating her brother in the woods. The bottom still dropped out of Mabel's stomach when she thought about how blithely she'd accepted it, how close she'd come to not making it out of the bunker at all. And she definitely hadn't forgotten how this Dipper had called her "Shooting Star". Mabel Pines was keeping her eyes wide open and her skepticles firmly strapped to her face. 

But...with Dipper here beside her, now, it felt like he'd never been gone.

The sun had already started to sink, low and purple, below the horizon by the time Mabel made her way back up to the attic after dinner. She found Dipper hovering on his stomach over his own rumpled bedsheets, staring down at the mystery novel Mabel had left open for him when he’d refused to follow her down to the kitchen, saying that having to smell the food when he couldn’t touch it to eat it was just torturous. His head popped up as Mabel crossed the threshold, a big, sharp-toothed grin splitting his face. “Mabel! Great! Would you turn the page for me?”

Mabel wandered across the room to flip the page Dipper pointed to. “You know, you could’ve just used Mini-Mabel,” she said, pointing a thumb over her shoulder at the sock puppet hanging from her bedpost.

“Tried it, but I couldn’t grab her to get her off the post,” Dipper said, pulling his legs up underneath him into a sitting position. “Next time you go, maybe leave her on the dresser or something?”

“Gotcha,” Mabel agreed. She walked over to her own bed, sitting down on it with an  _oomph_  beside where Waddles was curled up snoring peacefully and kicking her feet in the air in front of her where they dangled off the edge of the bed. She wondered, briefly, what it would be like to be stuck perma-hovering. 

There was a fly or something buzzing against the window. Mabel could hear the drone of its wings and the occasional  _bonk_  as it ran into the glass.

“You know, you’re gonna have to come downstairs sometime,” she said.

“Nobody else can see me,” Dipper pointed out. “Nobody’s even going to notice -”

“ _Bzzt,_  wrong.” Mabel gave her feet an extra-hard kick, knocking herself over onto her back. “Soos and Wendy were both asking about you. And Wendy’s friends. And Lazy Susan. And, like, everybody.”

“Really?” Dipper asked, and then, suspicion slamming down on the hope, “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better, are you?”

“Cross my heart,” Mabel said to the brightly-coloured Sev’ral Timez poster hanging on the slope of the wall above her.

The fly bonked against the window again, and Mabel started to count the bonks on her fingers. One, two, three, four, five...

“And Grunkle Stan?” Dipper asked, finally. Mabel curled both hands into the scratchy blanket under her before pushing herself up into a sitting position again, so she could meet her brother’s eyes.

“He’s...still kinda wrapping his head around everything.”

“Mabel, he thinks I’m Bill,” Dipper said flatly.

“You don’t know that!”

Dipper shot her a look, the same look he’d given her when she’d said she hadn’t got glitter all over their bedroom carpet.

Mabel laughed nervously. “Okay. I guess. But he doesn’t  _really_  really think that, or he would’ve done something about it. He’s just really scared, I think.” She gave her feet another slow, half-hearted kick. “He...didn’t tell me the whole story,” she started, slowly, “but he lost his brother, and the portal had something to do with it, which means Bill probably had something to do with it. Can you blame him for being a little freaked out?”

Mabel counted three  _bonk_ s of the fly against the window before Dipper spoke again, his voice a lot quieter now. “I...didn’t know that.”

“I think he just needs a little more time,” Mabel said, when she was sure Dipper wasn’t going to say anything else. “You know. To get used to stuff. Plus maybe we can show him how chill Waddles is around you!”

“What? What does Waddles have to do with anything?”

“He freaked right out when the Shapeshifter showed up. And do you remember him hanging around when Bill was in your body that time? Nope!” Mabel leaned over to give Waddles a scratch on the top of his head, and the pig snorted in his sleep before burrowing his snout farther in under the blankets. “Animals have instincts about these kinds of things. I read it in a Pony Club Friends Haunted Halloween Special  _and_  one of your dumb ghost hunting manuals, so it’s definitely true. If Grunkle Stan sees that Waddles trusts you, and that I trust you, then maybe he’ll feel better about trusting you too.”

“That’s actually a pretty good idea,” Dipper admitted, and then narrowed his eyes. “Wait, you read my Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Hunting Ghosts? When?”

“That’s not important,” Mabel said. “What’s important is that Grunkle Stan loves us enough to blow up the thing he’s been working on for thirty years for us, he’s not going to just turn around and kick you out just because of a little floating and invisibility and creepy eyes. And also that I definitely did not spill Diet Spite all over that page on poltergeists.”

Dipper looked down at the floor, but when he looked back up at Mabel he was smiling. “Thanks, Mabel,” he said, and then, “Wait, that was you? Aw, man, I thought the page had started manifesting ectoplasm! I wrote the author an email and everything!”

“Sorry, bro-bro,” Mabel said. “But hey, look on the bright side!”

“ _What_  bright side?”

“Give me a minute, I’m still thinking of one.”

The buzz of the fly still throwing itself against the window was joined by another sound. It took Mabel a couple of seconds to figure out that Dipper had started laughing. It was quiet at first, but by the time she figured out what was going on, Dipper was doubled over in midair, his shoulders shaking. 

“Are you okay?” Mabel asked, finally, and Dipper straightened up, sniffling a little as his laughter wound down.

“Yeah. Just - this is all so crazy. Who would’ve thought, when we got off that bus, that this was how things were gonna end up?”

Mabel tapped a finger against her chin. “I don’t know, I seem to recall  _some_ body going on about ‘Bigfoot country’...”

“Bigfoot, Mabel! Not - not secret illegal interdimensional portals that cause the end of the world! Not  _demons_!” 

“Be honest, bro. Would you really have wanted it any other way?”

The smile that crept across Dipper's face was small, but at least it looked real. "I guess you're right. It could've been a really boring summer."

Mabel smiled back. 

"And hey, what am I worrying about? We'll figure out how to fix this, like we always do." Dipper held out an arm, his hand balled into a loose fist. "Mystery Twins?"

"Mystery Twins," Mabel agreed, bouncing to her feet to lean over and tap her own fist against Dipper's.

There was just a fraction of a second when everything seemed to pause, and then Dipper's arm erupted into blue flames.

Both Mabel and Dipper stared at it for a long moment. Then Dipper pulled his hand away and shook it until the flames went out.

"This is gonna take some getting used to," he muttered.

Beside Mabel, Waddles grunted and turned over in his sleep.


End file.
